Mid-Victorian memories

MID-VICTORIAN MEMORIES

MID-VICTORIAN
MEMORIES

By MATILDA BETHAM-EDWARDS

OFFICIER DE L'INSTRUCTION PUBLIQUE DE FRANCE
ETC. ETC.

WITH A PERSONAL SKETCH BY

Mrs. SARAH GRAND

WITH A PORTRAIT

LONDON

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

1919

All rights reserved

CONTENTS

PAGE

Personal Sketch, by Mrs. Sarah Grand vii

I. Coventry Patmore . . . . i

II. Frederic Harrison . . . .16

III. George Eliot, Madame Bodichon, and Herbert

Spencer . . . . -37

IV. A Visit to Baron Tauchnitz . . .84
V. An Afternoon with Lord John Russell . 92

VI. Henry James . . . .101

VII. Amelia Blandford Edwards . . .110

VIII. An Hour with Miss Braddon . .119

IX. A French Talk with Lord Kitchener . 125

X. Recollections of Viscount Morley . -131

XI. "Mark Rutherford" . . . .140

XII. A Trio of Pioneers . . . -143

XIII. Mudie . . . . .150

XIV. Mr. John Murray .... 156
XV. Postscript . _ . . . . .165

42^54

NOTE BY THE PUBLISHER

By an unfortunate misunderstanding, the
letters of Mr. Frederic Harrison in Chapter
n. were in type and were passed for press
without having been submitted to the
writer, and without having obtained his
consent to their publication. He wishes
it to be understood that the letters were
confidential, and often playful, replies to
constant inquiries from Miss Betham-
Edwards as to his literary work — such as
he never contemplated leaving the hands
of his old friend.

MATILDA BARBARA BETHAM-
EDWARDS

1837-1919

It is sad to think that the busy little hand which
penned Mid- Victorian Memories will write no more,
sad to think that the writer is numbered now her-
self among our " Memories."

A melancholy interest attaches to the publication
of a last book. Ours is the disappointment of the
author. Delight in the doing consists largely in
expectation of publication, the crowning moment
of achievement. It is hard to be robbed of that
moment, and we feel it the harder in this instance
because we know how much it would have meant
to our friend. She had so looked forward to the
event ! It might have been her first book, she was
so impatient to see it in print. Or she may perhaps
have had a presentiment that it was to be her last,
and was anxious to lose no time. She had none
of the conceit which masks itself in affected in-
difference to the public reception of a book. A
sympathetic review elated, a spiteful one depressed

viii PERSONAL SKETCH

her. But these were passing effects. What she
treasured in her heart were the congratulations of
her friends. And she might well and did rejoice
in a letter of thanks and approval from Mr. Frederic
Harrison, Henry James, and other eminent friends
— though not more than she rejoiced in the response
of the undistinguished to whom she had presented
copies, provided the undistinguished were dear to
her. In regard to the worth of criticism she was
discriminating, but she valued cordiality for its own
sake, as a measure of affection. At eighty-two and
still in harness, still keenly alive intellectually and
with all her faculties intact, her record itself courted
congratulations, of which she would have had good
reason to be proud. Alas ! for those who loved
her that it had to be not flowers at her feet, but
funeral wreaths In Remembrance, and at heart the
sorrowful sense of "Too late."

She was wont to regret that she had not in-
stantly recorded her own first impressions of the
many interesting people she had met : "Don't make
my mistake, or you will be sorry for it," she often
advised. " Think of Boswell ! "

But thinking of Boswell was not persuasive.

A man's best work may soon be put out of date
by his successors who improve upon it. Generally
speaking, fame lives longest on personality, and
personality depends for its preservation on the
biographer's power of presentation. The tap-root

THE USE OF DIARIES ix

of Johnson's fame is his personality ; on that he
still lives, and Boswell planted it. If there had
been no Boswell there would have been little left
of Johnson by this time. But who ever wants to
be a Boswell ? Boswell himself was the enemy
of Boswellism. His own personality discounts the
credit of his industry, and besmirches its character.
We are obliged to him, but we neither like nor
respect him. Still, most of us live to regret that we
did not keep a modest diary of events. It would
have saved us remorse for lost opportunities.

One deterrent is the difficulty of recognising in
time among our many " lawful occasions," all so little
different, which is an opportunity not to be lost.
Recording each as it occurred for fear of missing
the one which will eventually prove to have been
important, would make huge inroads on our precious
time. First meetings seem ordinary enough at the
moment ; it is subsequent events that make them
memorable. Usually they take place on social
occasions, when nothing very arresting happens.
So-and-so, of whom we had heard, is casually
presented, and is very much what we expected —
or quite different. Venerable cliches are exchanged.
He or she may attract or may repel us. In-
voluntarily we make mental notes, but attach no
importance to them. Memory deals capriciously
with involuntary mental notes to which we have
attached no importance ; there is no counting on

X PERSONAL SKETCH

what it will single out for distinction and retain, or
what let slip ; its values are unexpected, and it plays
us the oddest tricks.

Glancing at a newspaper one day years ago I
chanced to see a letter "To the Editor," signed
M. Betham-Edwards. The writer had mentioned
me as "my friend, Sarah Grand." Her name was
familiar, but I had no recollection of ever having
met her. I took her friendliness to be the kindly
recognition of a newcomer as a colleague by one
looking down from the heights, and thought no
more about it. Then came a note from her. She
was staying at the Wellington Hotel, Tunbridge
Wells, after an illness, to recruit, and had heard
from her old friend Mr. Hale White ("Mark
Rutherford ") that I was at home, and she proposed
to pay me a visit — " if it please you, and you will
kindly name a convenient day and hour. I always
remember with pleasure our first meeting."

I still thought she must be mistaken about our
ever having met.

Feeling it proper that I should first pay my
respects to a distinguished woman of the previous
generation, I went at once to leave a card on her,
not expecting to be received, but she sent a mes-
senger hurrying after me as I left the hotel, to call
me back. She was standing when I was shown
into her sitting-room, and greeted me warmly, but
with restraint. Sincerity of feeling is like water.

APPEARANCE xi

still on the surface when it runs deep. There was
no mistaking her " I am glad to see you " for con-
ventional politeness. She was genuine, that was
my first impression.

I can see the little lady as she looked at that
moment, her abundant grey hair xoiled high on the
crown of her head, and cleverly arranged so as to
conceal the too great height of her forehead, her
grey eyes full of interest, a half smile on her lips ;
and I recalled my uncomfortable feeling in regard
to my own height, as I looked down on her, that
I was all out of proportion. It seemed assuming,
to be so much bigger in the flesh than a woman
who was so much bigger than myself in a finer
way. The only detail of her dress on this occasion
that I remember is the violet button she was entitled
to wear as an Officier de r Instruction Publiqtie de
France.

Now that we were face to face I was sure that
I had seen her before, but how and when and
where ?

When she had seated me to her satisfaction on
the only comfortable chair in the room — it took
some little time, for I was so ill-advised as to
dispute my right to it, not knowing then that a
favoured friend whom she delighted to honour by
forcing him or her (generally him) into the seat she
should by rights have taken herself, was obliged
heroically to endure to see her uncomfortably

xii PERSONAL SKETCH

perched while he or she sat at ease, as the only
way to please her, — when I had given in for the
same reason, she effectively recalled the circum-
stance of our first meeting, and at the same time
unwittingly made me feel ashamed of having
thought nothing of an incident which she had so
graciously cared to remember : " I have been hop-
ing to see more of you ever since that memorable
dinner when I sat next to you," she said.

The words ''memorable dinner" acted like
pressure on the button of an electric bell — or was
it thought-transference ? Anyway, there flashed
into my mind as in a picture, the details of a com-
plimentary public dinner-party in London, pillars and
paint and gilding and mirrors ; long tables loaded
with plate and glass and cutlery and flowers and
fruit ; seated guests, jostling waiters ; corks popping,
wine fizzing and frothing ; distracting clatter of
knives, forks, plates, and musical instruments ; the
dominating roar of voices — and the little lady
herself, seated beside me, placidly making the best
of it.

" I remember," I said.

I remembered perfectly.

The man who was to have taken her in to
dinner had not been able to keep his engagement,
so it happened that there was an empty chair
between us. It would be incorrect to say that she
broke the ice, for she gave it no time to form. I

OLD-FASHIONED COURTESY xiii

should have hesitated to speak first, partly out of
respect for her age, but mostly because by that time
I had been taught by sundry unpleasant experi-
ences in London crushes not to take the liberty of
speaking to unknown females met haphazard, even
at private entertainments. But she was well-bred.
She summed me up with a glance as she seated
herself, then, leaning across the empty chair, she
said easily, pleasantly, in the tone and manner of
one who accepts her fellow-guests as equals for the
time being and expects to be treated with the same
courtesy, tapping the chair as she spoke : " Shall
we have this obstruction removed ? " We had it
removed and drew our chairs close together, and
immediately it was as if I had met an old acquaint-
ance, who, without being curious, was interested in
all I chose to tell her concerning myself, and took
it for granted that I should return the compliment.
I remember my reply when I was asked afterwards
whom I had sat next "at the big feed": "A bonny-
looking, little elderly gentlewoman, with all her
wits about her. Cultivated. The real thing — ' old-
fashioned courtesy ' and all."

Even then courtesy, which makes the whole
difference between grace and charm in social inter-
course and the manners of a rabble, was called "old
fashioned," and was beginning to attract the kind of
attention that would be paid to a sedan chair in the
street, or any other revival of an obsolete custom.

xiv PERSONAL SKETCH

She looked at me with a little enigmatical smile
when I answered, " I remember," into which my
conscience read, " I wonder if you do."

" I couldn't think who you were," she proceeded ;
"but I inquired and was told, after we parted. Did
you know me ? "

*' No, but I know you now," I confidently
plunged. " You are My Brother s Wife, and a great
many other things."

" Apt in regard to My Brothers Wife, but wholly
incorrect," she answered drily, and paused, then
added, with a resigned little shrug: "'Twas ever
thus ! You mistake me for my cousin Amelia
Blandford Edwards. Naturally. I am moonlight
to her sunshine. Our two Bs — Blandford, Betham
— caused confusion. We each clung to her B,
though we were advised to drop it, one of us.
Francis Power Cobbe used to say that we both
had Bs in our bonnets. I don't suppose Amelia
was troubled with congratulations on being the
author of my books. It was monotonously the
other way. And I can't say I liked it. Or like it
even now."

"Pity me, then," I said.

"What for?"

"It hurts to have hurt."

"It hurts to have hurt," she repeated reflectively,
questioning the statement, and paused ; then, with a
wince, "It does hurt," she confessed.

SPORTSWOMEN xv

" Then we are quits ? " I suggested.

Whereupon she decided to laugh.

The Httle conscientious pause to make sure of
what she thought of an unexpected proposition was
habitual. She was gleg enough at the uptake on
occasion, but always, if she had to choose between
sincerity and "smartness," the telling repartee
promptly delivered or the homely truth on reflec-
tion, she reflected.

"Quits then it is," I ventured. "Now we are
friends ? "

"Sportswomen, eh?" She made a comical
attempt to adapt herself to the genus. " Well,
I'm game — if that's the right jargon. Here's my
hand on it, and we'll wet the bargain."

The bargain was wetted in tea.

There was never any restraint after that, never
the least disagreeable difference.

To be met again and again, as she had been all
through her career, by new acquaintances, with
compliments intended for her showier cousin, when
she had so good a right to be known for admirable
work of her own, was enough to set up a chronic
sore sufficiently painful to make her wince at a
touch. The wonder was that it had not changed
her feeling for her cousin. It had not. She
delighted in Amelia's beauty, her versatility, her
achievements, and spoke and wrote of her to the
last with the greatest affection.

xvi PERSONAL SKETCH

I had nothing subsequently to alter and little to
add to my first impression of Miss Betham- Edwards.
She was always the same, courteous, responsive,
gentle, punctilious, and essentially sincere, a typical
English gentlewoman of the old school. One would
rather not date her so, but there is nowhere else to
place such women in these rude times, when the
conceit of education by promoting tawdry-minded
self-assertiveness, and the decline of culture, too
often combine in effect to produce so different a
type. It is an ugly phase, but only a phase
surely. The intrinsic value and beauty of the grace
and charm of mind and manners which were the aim
of culture in her day cannot be lost. There will be
a revival of taste eventually in favour of refinement,
as in the case of treasures of art which have been
rediscovered by successors to the generation that
was insensible to their merits, and had cast them
aside as of no account.

In breeding, in culture, in appearance, and in
refinement Miss Betham-Edwards was an English-
woman of the best type — improved by a dash of
French blood and intimate association with the
French themselves in France. She had none of
the stiffness and angularity which so often make
Englishwomen repellent. She was delightfully
French in her daintiness, her self-forgetfulness, her
show of sympathetic interest in and habit of giving
her undivided attention to the person she addressed.

FORTUNATE WITH AGE xvii

And naturally. She did not pose, did not affect to
be French either by gesticulating or interlarding her
conversation with French phrases — though she often
wrote them. She had no mannerisms, but she had
little ways of her own and was " set in them " (as we
say in the north), and one had to give in to them.
She would have things done regularly and in order,
in the same order each time, and it did not do to
upset it. She was upwards of sixty when I first
met her, with a neat figure, and tiny hands and feet.
One never thought of her as an old woman, she was
so mentally alert, so wonderfully in possession of
every faculty. Judging by her early portraits she
was one of those fortunate women whom age em-
bellishes. The years gave her more than they took.
They left her her delicate complexion and abundant
hair, improved her mouth, made her eyes less
brightly observant but more sympathetic, and soft-
ened her expression with kindliness. She must
always have been nice looking, and finally she was
pretty.

The instinct of self-preservation was marked in
her. She remained efficient to the last by resolutely
economising her strength. She tended her faculties
like children, clothing them, feeding them, exercising
them, and putting them to bed punctually. The
morning was her time for work, and of late years she
limited herself to two hours a day. It was astonish-
ing how much she accomplished in this short time

xviii PERSONAL SKETCH

by strict regularity. By the end of the year she
had always more to show than younger and more
vigorous writers of her acquaintance, who only
worked by fits and starts when they felt in the
mood. Against "mood" she gave it as her own
experience that lappetit vient en mangeant, and
instanced Anthony Trollope and Sir Walter Scott.
Excellent advice provided the writer who is favoured
with flashes of inspiration destroys all that he writes
when he is not feeling inspired. Mood is naturally
a vagrant, but amenable to discipline ; let it rule
you and there is no counting upon it ; but put it
into harness, break it in with whip and spur at your
writing-table for a stipulated time every day, and it
will end as an obedient servant, ready to respond
when it should be on duty. There is no exception
to the rule which makes for production of any kind ;
it is always most haste least speed ; bursts of energy
culminate in exhaustion and are followed by pro-
longed intervals of idleness, and the tortoise wins
the race while the hare is asleep.

Miss Betham-Edwards lived by rule, and the
result justified the habit. She was Spartan in her
self-denial, and would forego the pleasure of a visit
to a friend if the arrangements to which she was
accustomed could not be carried out. Latterly her
acceptance of invitations was frankly conditional.
She went yearly to stay with two French friends
near Paris up to the time of their death, but after

«AS EXACTING AS ROYALTY'' xix

that the only visits she paid were to a friend at
Oxford and to our mutual friend Miss Tindall at
Tunbridge Wells. This visit should properly have
been to me, but when we came to consult about the
little lady's entertainment, I felt bound to resign my
prior right in consideration of the many advantages
she would enjoy at Hollyshaw that could not be
procured for her at my house in the town.

I remember that before her first visit to Holly-
shaw an acquaintance warned Miss Tindall that she
was as exacting as a Royal Personage, and gave
examples of her requirements with the comment
that one experience of her as a guest would be
enough. But Miss Tindall was not to be daunted.
Indeed, it was rather with interest than with trepi-
dation that she prepared for the visit. She expected
surprises, but she did not anticipate more trouble
than it would be a pleasure to take for the comfort
of a friend whom she loved and respected. It may
seem that the older acquaintance who warned her was
justified, but she was wrong in her forecast of the result
of the experiment. Miss Tindall's hospitality survived
the test, and the invitation was repeated as often as
the necessary conditions for a visit could be made.

Acting on the suggestion, Miss Tindall decided
to prepare for that first visit as for a Royal Personage,
by writing to ask what her expected guest desired
for her entertainment and comfort ; but Miss
Betham- Edwards anticipated her, and their letters

XX PERSONAL SKETCH

crossed. The characteristic touches in Miss
Betham-Edwards' letter are worth preserving. She
wrote :

Villa Julia, Hastings,

4/9/12.

Dear Rachel Mary, — I will arrive to-morrow
with E. [Emily] in time (I hope) for tea, i.e. at
Tunbridge Wells by 4.30, and both mistress and
maid are looking forward to the visit. Will you, in
view of my age and infirmities, excuse me for
asking you to let me have cotton, unlavendered
sheets on my bed, and only well-worn blankets,
the scent of new blankets being very trying to me,
also the scent of lavendered sheets.

Also may I ask for dark curtains to the
windows, as I like to exclude every particle of light
at night. And again, as I should hardly like to
bring it with me, may I say that the only wine I
drink by medical orders is a glass of very light
Chablis at lunch.

And, lastly, will you excuse me if I cannot
partake of any good things at your table, being
only able to eat the plainest of plain nursery fare,
no delicacies whatever.

Pray forgive these particulars, it is on account
of them that I have only been able to accept the
hospitality of two old friends since my breakdown
six years ago. But I feel sure that you will under-
stand how impossible it is for me to do as younger
and less worn-out folks do.

Kindest love to self and grand Sarah. Yours
ever, M. B.-E.

A BILL OF WANTS xxi

The following is a Bill of Wants she furnished
subsequently for her hostess's guidance :

Kindly asked for particulars of M. B.-E's wants: —

"Chablis at dinner, (I always make dinner of
other folks' lunch).

" Cotton sheets and not linen on bed.

" Dark curtains on windows.

" Diet — of the nursery order, i.e. plainest of the
plain, no kind of delicacies, and only plain and very
stale cakes.

*' For supper a slice of cold mutton, lamb,
or chicken. Game I never touch, do. entries,
creams, etc., all taboo."

" Isn't that considerate ? " Miss Tindall remarked
on these precautions. " It would save me many
qualms of doubt and anxiety on the subject of my
guests' comfort if they would all tell me as frankly
what they object to and would like."

Immediately on their arrival Miss Betham-
Edwards' beloved maid Emily (beloved by us all,
for that matter, in gratitude for the years during
which she smoothed the way for our friend by
taking on herself every trouble in life of which it
was possible to relieve her) — Emily had to set to
work to arrange the room her lady had of necessity
to occupy at Hollyshaw, to suit her taste, — a hard
task considering the difference between the largre
apartment with its big bay window looking out

xxii PERSONAL SKETCH

upon tree-sheltered gardens and meadows, and the
cloistered simplicity of the little bedroom at home
which was her ideal of what a bedroom should be.
Brightness and tranquillity were what she had
aimed at when she furnished it. She had had it
papered with golden yellow to give it brightness.
Neither pictures nor ornaments would she have,
because they caught the eye and gave food for
thought, which disturbed the mind. Perfect uni-
formity, she held, was the secret of tranquillity.

Emily did her best at HoUyshaw to prevent
mental distraction by covering certain glossy articles
of furniture and all the mirrors with shawls and
rugs brought for the purpose. What the servants
thought of the room when she had done with it
can be imagined. It looked like a gipsy campment.

Then it appeared that Miss Betham-Edwards
was peculiarly sensitive to noise. She could not
endure a sound in the house from the time she
retired to her room for the night until she was
about again next day. This difficulty was tackled
at once and bravely overcome. At 6 o'clock every
evening shutters were closed, curtains drawn, doors
locked, and all the racket of shutting up done for
the night ; and for the rest of the evening, every one
playing up gallantly, not a voice was raised and only
the stealthiest movements were made all over the
house. Next morning, much to the gardeners'
annoyance, their usual early work of rolling the

THOUGHTFULNESS xxiii

terrace beneath the lady's windows, mowing the
lawns, and tidying up generally was stopped, while,
indoors, shutters were not opened or curtains drawn
until she was known to be awake. Miss Tindall
too, in the next room, denying herself the early
morning freshness and sunshine, waited patiently in
darkness for fear that the rattle of rings on curtain
poles and the opening of windows to push back
Venetian shutters, should disturb her guest: "And
it was worth it," Miss Tindall said.

For never did hostess have a more delightful
visitor — she was such good company, so punctilious,
so kindly considerate, so appreciative of the least
little service. After her visit she would send a
message of thanks and a book to every member
of that large household, not one was forgotten.
And at Christmas each again received a dainty little
present from her. She had that grace of nature
which commands the heart, and, although "nobody
had ever seen such goings on," the maids had vied
with each other in their desire to please her, con-
forming as punctually and pleasantly as she did
herself to all that was unaccustomed in the strict
ritual prescribed for each day.

When at Hollyshaw it was her habit to pay her
respects to her hostess the first thing in the morning
by sending Emily to deliver the formula : " Miss
Betham-Edwards' love, and she would like to see
Miss Tindall in her room, any time after half-past

xxiv PERSONAL SKETCH

nine, if Miss Tindall is at liberty." Miss Tindall
made a point of being at liberty. This was the
time at which they had their most delightful talks
together, for the dear old lady, strengthened by her
night's rest and stimulated by her breakfast, was
then at her best.

The small lady had dignity, the dignity which is
founded on self-respect and sustained by the respect
accorded to it. She "received" with a becoming
sense of her own importance as sufficient to render
her immediate surroundings of no account. Not
that there was anything in her surroundings that
needed an apology. The effect of the " gipsy
encampment" was not disorderly but decorative.
The room was always well-aired, and the little fire,
which she had to have whatever the time of year,
brightened it and was appropriate as a finishing
touch. Everything about her was dainty and fresh,
and she herself in the midst of it was like a little
queen holding her court. She would be attired in a
beautiful wrapper, with her hair carefully dressed,
and on her writing-table the materials for the work
she was engaged upon, manuscripts or proofs, would
be neatly laid out. This was not a hint to be brief.
She liked to dilate upon what she was doing, to
give the outline of a story, to read a proof aloud
and consult about it. She liked to hear what you
thought ; but she would have it her own way if
your opinion differed from hers.

CONSIDERATE COWS xxv

One morning Miss Tindall was " received " in
great perturbation. Cows had been introduced
into the meadow opposite the house ! During
the night ? ... or since she came, Miss Betham-
Edwards was sure. But it must have been recently,
for they had not disturbed her.

The inference that she confidently expected to
be disturbed by them reduced Miss Tindall to
despair. The cows were not under her control and
she had no power to order them off. But it turned
out to be her rest that was broken — by dread of
their lowing. For the cows proved to be real ladies.
Miss Betham-Edwards herself acknowledged at
the end of her visit that they were well-behaved
cows, and had been most considerate.

It may be mentioned as an instance of how
much sensitive people can do to save themselves
suffering by controlling their nerves instead of
humouring them and insisting on having them
humoured, till they are like children spoilt by being
given too much of their own way, — that during her
last visit to Hollyshaw, in 19 17, Miss Betham-
Edwards had evidently been relieved of a good
deal of her nervous horror of noise. It was a case
of what can't be cured must be endured. The war
had obliged her to accommodate herself to a medley
of strange sounds, and on this occasion she was able
to bear, with at least outward equanimity, even
the distracting din made by a party of buglers in

xxvi PERSONAL SKETCH

training, all at the same time practising different
notes and calls, a daily trial of patience calculated
to wring expletives from a Christian martyr.

The next item of the day's ritual, after the
morning reception, was the drive before lunch.
Punctually to the minute — the little lady was never
a moment late for anything — she would come down
ready dressed and be piloted across the slippery
parquet of the hall by Emily to the carriage. She
begged that Emily might be allowed to accompany
her, the drive would be such a pleasure to Emily,
and what was good for the mistress was good for
the maid. She preferred to sit with her back to the
horses, with Emily seated opposite, beside Miss
Tindall, so that she could see them both. She kept
up a lively conversation. Everything interested
her, nothing escaped her. She revelled in the
beauty of the day, of the landscape, of dark fir
woods, of giant forest trees, solitary survivors in
the hedgerows, dominating the fields in splendid
isolation. But her enjoyment of the scenery did
not blind her to the condition of insanitary cottages
or evidences of the wasteful neglect of good land.
Miss Tindall remembers one specially dramatic
occasion after an election when her guest's democratic
gorge rose vigorously against aristocratic domination
in general and iniquitous landlords in particular, who
kept the peasantry in a state of serfdom mitigated
by doles at Christmas. Fortunately it did not occur

LITTLE WAYS xxvii

to her as incongruous to use that particular carriage
both for her own enjoyment and as a pulpit from
which to denounce the extravagance and luxury of
the rich ; otherwise there might have been an end
to the great benefit her health was deriving in a
manner not consistent with her principles.

When she had expended her eloquence and
reduced herself to a temporary state of exhaustion
she would say to Emily, " Now, Emily, say your
little piece to Miss Tindall," and Emily would ask,
'• Which piece, ma'am ? " ** Oh, you know," she was
reminded, "the one about . . .," and the subject
would be given, whereupon Emily obligingly com-
plied. "Very nice," she was invariably applauded,
with a gracious little bow, accompanied by the
enigmatical smile.

At luncheon the little lady shone in conversation
delightfully, as though the drive had sharpened her
wits as well as her appetite. One of the items
on the Hst of "Kindly asked for particulars" was
"Chablis at dinner (I always make my dinner at
other folks' lunch)." She drank her Chablis out of
a little ruby-red tumbler of her own which she
always brought with her. Doubtless it had a
history, but she never told us it. What with slow
eating and much talk luncheon was a lengthy
function, but it did not seem so to us. Some of
her friends thought her conversation better than her
books, yet she spoke as she wrote. The difference

xxviii PERSONAL SKETCH

was in the reading ; she should be read as she
spoke. Those who knew her voice hear her in
every phrase. Her later style in writing was
sprinkled with preciosity and became somewhat
archaic. Early impressions are sharpest, and hers
prevailed in her later years. The influences that
formed her mind gradually became apparent in her
style.

" My first educators — could any of mortal born
choose better? — were the Bible, Shakespeare and
Milton," she tells us in her Reminiscences. " Next
after this triune splendour, this matchless trinity,
come Walter Scott, the Spectator and Tatler, Don
Quixote (Smollett's translation), the Arabian Nights,
The Vicar of Wakefield, Gulliver s Travels, and
Boswell's Johnson.'' But her own charm graced
their language as she spoke it and made all that
she said seem pleasing and appropriate and natural.
"Her voice, too," as she herself wrote of a young
Quakeress friend of her youth, " was one of un-
common sweetness and feeling, and she spoke
with an ease, clearness, and precision that deserve
the name of an accomplishment." There was no
mistaking "simplicity for baldness" in her case;
she suggested more than she said. And it deserves
to be noted as a distinction rare in clever men and
women, that she never bored one by "talking
clever " all the time. Any subject was grist to her
mill, from Welt-politik to the last fad in dress.

TALK ABOUT BOOKS xxix

When she talked about books she talked well,
thanks to her excellent memory and extensive
reading. She cared more for human nature than
for abstract ideas. Men and women were more to
her than their achievements. The personality of
the worker came first, and Herbert Spencer himself
appeared in her conversation as of greater import-
ance than Synthetic Philosophy. She would soon
pass on from the book that was under discussion
to anecdotes about the author, or inquiries, if he
were new to her. She took his character and
appearance into account to explain his ideas, as
on one occasion when she trenchantly observed
of a man whose works and ways she detested :
" What better could be expected of a glutton who
looked like a camel with a monkey's head."

She would never monopolise the conversation ;
a fair give and take was her principle. Her friends
would rather have listened to her, but she was for
drawing them out. She had the gift. And that
other good gift too, in a listener, of making the
speaker happy in the belief that she was finding
what he had to say worth hearing.

So the luncheon — her great meal of the day —
was a rite to be enjoyed from start to finish. It was
as if conversation were the object, and eating an
incident. The leisurely consumption of the " Diet
— of the nursery order, i.e., plainest of the plain, no
kind of delicacy," was suspended when she spoke
3

XXX PERSONAL SKETCH

and only resumed as a profitable pastime in silent
intervals, like a piece of work a busy woman
ventures to "get on with" in company, because
it does not distract her attention. A congenial man
added to the luncheon-party had a pronounced effect
as a stimulant to mind and memory. One such man,
a budding author, young and good-looking, asked
to meet her, thanked his hostess afterwards "for the
treat." " One does not often meet a woman so
altogether charming," he said. Her age had not
affected him as in most cases it would have affected
a young man in regard to a woman ; like the rest of
us, he had not thought of her as old.

After luncheon she would retire to her room to
rest until tea-time, when she would reappear in the
drawing-room, to fortify herself with " only plain,
very stale cakes," provided according to order.
Then I came on duty to take her for her afternoon
walk on her favourite asphalt path. There she
enjoyed the shelter of the high hedge on the one
hand and the view on the other — the old trees, the
delicious green of a rich meadow sprinkled with
flowers, a glimpse of gardens, and, beyond all, the
hilly ground rising gently to the sky. Often her
eyes were lovingly turned to the prospect — the
same prospect on which George Meredith's eyes
once dwelt, doubtless as lovingly. These were
good times for me. Sometimes she introduced
subjects on which she knew that we differed, stating

WORK FOR WOMEN xxxi

her own point of view dispassionately, for the purpose
of hearing mine. She had no desire to convert me.
She was one of the signatories of the first petition
to Parliament for the enfranchisement of women,
but afterwards changed her views and became a
passive opponent of the movement. Taking no
part in public affairs herself, she had never come
up against that bar to progress, ** the dead brick
wall," of which such great reformers as Josephine
Butler, Frances Power Cobbe, Sophia Jex Blake,
and her own particular friend Madame Bodichon,
complained that it blocked the efforts of women in
every direction, and would do so until they procured
its only leveller, the vote. Why exactly she had
changed her mind she never explained. The
remarkable women who first headed the movement
were her particular friends and had probably carried
her along with them, and it may be that afterwards,
when time and distance separated her from them,
beinor no lonofer under their immediate influence and
unhampered in her own personal work for want of
the vote, her desire for the enfranchisement of
women had lapsed insensibly into unfriendly in-
difference. The friends she had cared for and
respected most were among the prophets, but she
had no vocation herself for the fate of a prophet
in his own country. The part of onlooker and
impartial critic suited her best, though latterly, in
regard to women, she was not impartial. Probably,

xxxii PERSONAL SKETCH

as her retrospect lengthened, distance had pro-
duced the usual effect, and recalling the picked
women she had under close observation in her youth,
she unfairly compared them, minus their faults, with
ordinary modern women whose faults were still too
prominently in evidence to be ignored. At any
rate, her opinion of women had changed for the
worse in the course of time, and during the war the
more proof women gave of their worth as citizens
the less faith she had in them. She acknowledged
that women answer to expectation ; but she argued
that you could only expect what you had discovered
in them, and that experience, by confirming her
own views of their pettiness, made it impossible for
expectation to remedy their defects.

But it was not often that she argued about
anything. She disliked controversial subjects and
disposed of them arbitrarily. Her friends knew
better than to persist, but strangers ventured and
were summarily dealt with. Her temper was quick,
but under control, just a flash and over ; but in that
flash she got home a touch of caustic neatly.

Her sense of humour was always on the alert
and her laughter spontaneous, yet one was not
"sure to enjoy a good laugh" in her company.
She was rather more apt to be quietly witty than
to provoke laughter, in a tete-a-tHe, but she was
always interesting. Naturally, when we were alone
together, "shop" was a favourite topic. The

PLANS FOR WORK xxxiii

fertility of her mind seemed inexhaustible. She
carried any number of plans for work clearly
arranged in her head — subjects for essays, plots
for novels, short stories, and poems. She could
relate a short story she intended to write as though
she were repeating it by heart. Had it been taken
down at the moment there would have been little or
nothing to alter. She expected as much of me —
vainly. Sometimes a halting attempt stirred her to
help me. She had been kindly interested in a book
of mine which was designed to have a sequel, and
one day on the asphalt path, by way of spurring me
on to work, she gave me what she supposed would
be my plot. There was no resemblance. It was
like listening to some one who had been misinformed
about the doings of friends with whom I had kept
in close touch. I knew she was mistaken, yet her
circumstantial account implanted a doubt in my mind
as to which of us were really the better informed.
In effect, it disturbed my certainty without convinc-
ing me of error, and the sequel was never written.

At six o'clock she retired to her room for the
night, and was no more seen, except by the invalu-
able Emily. Her last simple meal — " For supper,
a slice of cold mutton, lamb, or chicken. Game I
never touch, do. entrees, creams, etc., all taboo" —
was sent up to her. She spent the evening in
reading or in being read to by Emily. Occasionally
she would write an urgent letter or a post card, but

xxxiv PERSONAL SKETCH

she rigorously forbore even to look at the work she
was engaged upon at the moment, once she had put
it away for the day.

Her reading was habitually determined by the
quality of print and paper. Small print or bad
paper she would not look at. "I have my eyes to
consider," she said, and she had considered them to
such good purpose that her oculist complimented
her eyes at eighty on being as good as they were
at sixty. She was for having readers strike against
bad paper and print for the sake of their eyes — " not
to mention their poor brains, which become con-
gested when their eyes are strained to close atten-
tion. Middle-aged readers are the principal buyers
of books, therefore too valuable an asset for the
publisher to trifle with. If only they would abstain
from reading anything but good type, there would
soon be an end of mean economy in print and paper."

After a visit our little lady was wont to write to
her hostess immediately on reaching home, another
" old-fashioned " all but obsolete custom which had
its uses and its beauties. The following extracts
from a letter written after her last visit to Hollyshaw
are typical of the punctilious exactness of her acknow-
ledgments :

Villa Julia, 11/9/17.

My dear Rachael Mary, — Safe home and all
the better for your kind hospitality — shall be all the
(bodily) better for your most generous hamper of

"NANNIE L. S." XXXV

fruit. I feel filled with the fine air of your woods
and with the fine shifting harmonies of forest
scenery. Kindly destroy Nannie L. S.'s letter and
— if you think well — hand on enclosed to lady
reciter. Best love to grand Sarah and on y"" knees
beg her to keep herself warm. ... I will also send
you — as you like the house decently found in books
— one or two of mine in the nice per 3d. editions. I
shall try to act on your suggestion and arrange for
3/6 eds. of the best. The difficulty is that the
original publisher came to grief or the house
changed hands ... so that I have no interest on
their part and no series into which the books would
fall naturally. . . No more to-day except to add
Emily's heartfelt thanks for all your kindness and
also for the kind attention of your household. — Ever
affect'^ y", Matilda Barbara.

"The Nannie L. S." she mentions was Miss
Leigh Smith, sister of Barbara Leigh Smith, the
Madame Bodichon who figured with great distinc-
tion in the history of her times and in George
Eliot's correspondence and Miss Betham-Edwards'
Reminiscences. The charm of Madame Bodichon's
personality, so often lovingly dwelt on in the records
of her friends, could be well imagined by those who
had the pleasure of knowing her sister, Miss Leigh
Smith, whose loss, alas ! is being mourned as I write.
She was a great lady. And good. The "enclosed"
mentioned in Miss Betham-Edwards' letter, which
Miss Tindall was to "hand on to the lady reciter"

xxxvi PERSONAL SKETCH

— " if you think well " — was from Miss Leigh Smith,
who was one of the party on the occasion, and
unconsciously showed something of her lovely self
worth preserving, in a few lines she wrote to "my
dearest Milly " afterwards. " Lovely " is here used
in the American sense, but even in old age it applied
to her physical no less truly than to her inward and
spiritual grace.

" Here I am," she wrote, "and up to the ears in
duties — first a blind woman to provide for — and lots
of other things, so forgive furious haste.

" I send a clever poem, copied by Janet Crowe,
which may please the gifted reciter who delighted
us all on Sunday — if you will pass it on to her.

" My best thanks to Miss Tindall for so kindly
admitting me to her charming gathering — and also
in allowing my Bernadina (her Italian maid) to have
the delight of seeing her most beautiful garden. . . ."

The "gifted reciter" was our friend Miss Marie
Shedlock, who that day (as usual) had generously
given us of her best both in French and English.

Recollections of a friend stand not upon the
order of their coming, and it is best to take them as
they come. There is less in life to be had for the
satisfaction of the heart than of the intellect ; the
intellect is being catered for incessantly, but the
heart, nowadays, is usually sent empty away. And
it is the heart that is all-important. We owe more

A PORTRAIT xxxvii

to our friends for their kindness than for their
cleverness, and the friends of our hearts whom we
lose remain more to us, in death as in life, than the
works they leave to us. In thinking of them it is
the little distinctive traits which endeared them to us
that recur most vividly. The aim of this sketch is
to be a portrait of the woman. " Speaking like-
nesses " are composed of details, trivial in them-
selves, but necessary for the whole effect. The
method is to be defended in the interests of truth.
A few sweeping strokes give but a general impres-
sion which, like most generalisation, is as often as
not erroneous ; and the one-sided view of a profile
suppresses too much that is of value to be the right
kind of half which is better than the whole. Crom-
well was right to have his warts painted in ; it
would not have been Cromwell without them. If
the portrait fails of its effect it is not the method
but the artist that is at fault, and his excuse may be
that the attempt was worth while.

The great moments of life are generally seized
upon for a portrait. They may be striking, but they
are not representative. Homely circumstances are
the test of permanent character ; exceptional occa-
sions call for exceptional acts. Habits differ from
circumstances in that they may be the outcome
either of character or of principle. This makes it
dangerous to be inexact in depicting them ; there is
the danger of giving a wholly wrong and unjust

xxxviii PERSONAL SKETCH

impression. Miss Betham- Edwards' habits, in so
far as they differ from the ordinary, were the out-
come both of character and of principle. It is a
virtue to mind one's own business ; her business
was authorship, and she minded it consistently. It
is a virtue to be thorough, and she could only be
thorough by living for her work on principle. This
necessitated rules of life. She turned her instinct of
self-preservation to account solely for the benefit of
her work. If she has been made to appear selfish
in this she has been misrepresented. The selfish-
ness would have been in those who expected her,
for their convenience, to be false to her principles by
altering the habits which enabled her to live up to
them. As it was, she gave too generously of her
strength to help and encourage others on occasion.
No one was ever a better, more satisfying friend.
She never failed one, never disappointed one, never
lost touch with one. To the end her interest in all
that concerned a friend never flagged, and notes,
post cards, and little presents constantly bore
witness to her lively affection. Her post cards
(often signed "Base and degrading 'Tilda'")
shamed the excuse of correspondents who profess to
have "no time to write." Time can always be had
for the making. One of her post cards would have
more that was essential on it in the way of matter
of interest and importance to the recipient than
many people's longest letters. Ill or well, she

LOVE OF PRETTY THINGS xxxix

responded instantly and fully to letters, so long as
she could hold a pen. On her death-bed, when she
could no longer write, she dictated answers to the
letters she received, and with the last flicker of her
mortal intelligence she sent a cheery message to
comfort her friends.

The dear little lady was very woman in her love
of pretty things. We always dressed in our best
to please her. If we had succeeded, Emily would
immediately be called that she might as usual have
a share of the pleasure — " Emily, I want you to
come and look at the ladies" — and Emily's atten-
tion would be directed to the points her lady
specially admired. But we could never be certain
of success beforehand, for her taste was capricious.
Expensive attempts, trophies of a trip to France,
were sometimes not favoured with a second glance,
while, on the other hand, a little something made at
home by our Treasure of the Humble, who came
out to work by the day, would delight her.

The easy hour's journey from Tunbridge Wells
to Hastings made it possible for us to spend long
afternoons with her. We never took her by sur-
prise, or proposed ourselves. It was understood
that we should wait to be asked — or, as a friend
laughingly put it, "until she held out the sceptre"
— then we would be quite sure that she would be
glad of a visit. She shared her friends liberally by
asking them to meet each other — or anybody whose

xl PERSONAL SKETCH

acquaintance she thought it would please them to
make. There was a ritual for these occasions, so
seldom varied that it became an agreeable habit.
The rules of procedure were precise. We knew
exactly the ordering of events, but never knew what
to expect from the company collected for our enter-
tainment, and this sufficed to vary the monotony
both at the time and in anticipation. Surprises
awaited the kind of person who expected to be
asked to meet only "the best people," in the matter
of class, for she cared not in the least who anybody
was by birth. Social position made no impression
whatever upon her. The measure of her respect
for her fellow-creatures was the measure of their
character, what they were and their accomplish-
ments. She would delight in an intellectual baker,
and be frankly bored by a stupid duke.

It was a formidable climb up to her Villa Julia,
the house at the near end of the row at High
Wickham ; but we took the precaution to order a
taxi in advance to meet us at the station at Hastings.
Half-way up the hill we came in sight of her sitting-
room window, and of her watching for us, handker-
chief in hand, ready to respond to our signals. We
lost sight of her at the steepest bit of the hill — the
bit that was so nearly the death of Henry James
when he climbed it on foot to save the life of a cab-
horse (why didn't he have a taxi ?) — but when we
rounded the turn she would be standing at the hall

THE SITTING-ROOM xli

door, with Emily stationed at the little iron gate,
waiting to open it. Emily greeted, we ran up the
flagged path and were welcomed from the steps
with outstretched hands and cheeks presented to be
kissed.

Miss Tindall's offerings of home-produce, fruit,
flowers, eggs and butter, were lovingly appreciated
in the hall, then we were ushered up to the dear
little lady's sitting-room. It was frankly the work-
shop of a cultivated woman, who had no use for
boudoir fal-lals. The dado was bookshelves filled
with standard works in several languages. On top
of it were crowded rare specimens of china collected
in many lands. Above, the walls were covered
with pictures, each with a history, but there was
only one portrait in the room. She liked to have
portraits of her " living friends," but kept them
locked up, with the single exception of Dr. Dodson
Hessey's, "my good friend and benefactor." She
might well make him the exception, for he had been
to her what Dr. John Elliotson was to Thackeray,
who dedicated Pendenjiis to him in recognition of
" constant care and kindness " ; what Mr. Buckston
Browne was to George Meredith, who called him
"the ablest and one of the best of men," and
dedicated Lord Ormont and His Aniinta to him ;
what Sir Andrew Clark was to George Eliot, "the
beloved physician." Should the Roll of Honour
kept in the hearts of grateful patients ever be

xlii PERSONAL SKETCH

published, Dr. Hessey's name would be found
figuring large among the many gifted and generous
men of his profession to whom authors and artists
of all grades have owed their lives and more than
their lives, namely, the preservation of the intellectual
strength which made life worth having.

In Matilda Barbara's sitting-room she loved to
be called Matilda Barbara. I shall never forget
how her face brightened with surprise and pleasure
the first time one of us ventured on it, in inverted
commas, as it were. The sound of her Christian
name had become strange and was sweet to her,
there were so few left who still called her by it, so
few who came close enough to have a claim to the
right. Age is the lonelier for the formality with
which it is treated. In one corner of her sitting-
room was a round table covered with the books,
papers, and magazines she had in use at the
moment ; in the opposite corner her pianette stood
away from the bookshelves, with the music on it —
good music — bearing witness to her taste. The
little sofa on which she always sat stood up against
the wall on a line with the window. We were
placed opposite with a little tea-table between us.
There was no escape for me from the one arm-chair
close to the fire, but Miss Tindall had a footstool to
compensate for the height of her seat. As soon as
we were settled in our places, Emily appeared with
a tray, on which were two cups of delicious tea, a

"MADAM MUST SMOKE" xliii

box of matches, and a miniature earthenware bowl
for an ash-tray, and set it on the table, with the in-
variable formula : "Just to refresh the ladies after
their journey, and madam must smoke her cigarette."

Only two people were privileged to smoke in
the house, the beloved physician, of course, because
he required the rest and relaxation of a cigarette,
and myself — a benign concession to a bad habit, in
pity for the weakness of the flesh. And smoke we
had to, willy-nilly. There is no satisfaction in a
cigarette if one suspects that one's hospitable
hostess is enduring rather than enjoying the smell
of it. I once tried the experiment of going un-
provided, but never again ! The plea that I had
brought none because it was good for me to go
without was scouted as "rubbish," and Emily was
dispatched on the instant to borrow cigarettes from
the "son of the cottage at the back." His mother
would know where he kept them if he was out at
work. His mother did know. They were not the
brand I usually smoked.

This was the most delightful time, when we had
the litde lady all to ourselves, and we always wished
it had lasted longer. Sitting with her back to the
light she beamed on us, happy as a hen with two
erratic ducklings safely recovered from the pond.
Aged eyes are kind to their friends ; the ravages of
time escape them. She never looked at us through
her spectacles, so to the last, even in the fifth year

xliv PERSONAL SKETCH

of the war, she remained happily unaware of any
sorrowful change in us that would have distressed
her. When we were alone together she could be as
young and merry herself as she thought us. Once
when we were talking about what we liked to do
best for a diversion, capping an extravagance that
had amused her, she said : "What would please me
best on a fine summer day would be to be taking
tea with a French officer on a Boulevard in Paris,
in a new French bonnet." We pictured the French
officer proudly delighting in her company as in that
dune Tfiere bien aimde \ but we exclaimed, "O
frivolous! Qui pent tout dire arrive a tout f aire,''
and inadvertently gave her a chance, for the phrase
cuts both ways. Qui peut tout dire when he aspires
to do right, arrive a tout fair e to further his purpose.
And gaiety went out in moralising, which culminated
in Shelley's sigh :

" Alas ! we know not what we do
When we speak words ! "

Our audience was cut short by the arrival of
the guests for tea, whom we were hurried down to
meet in the dining-room. She gave us " school-
room teas," and it was pleasant to see her enjoying
her own hospitality, as it were, in the appetites of
the friends she collected round her table. No
" plain very stale cakes " for them. The home-
made best of everything was somehow provided,

THE CHAIR OF HONOUR xlv

including those wonders in war-time, lump sugar
and apricot jam. The difficulty was to satisfy her
that you had had enough. It was wise to curb
your appetite at lunch if you were going to have
tea with Miss Betham-Edwards. Seated in her
own particular chair — the chair she describes in her
notes upon Henry James — she kept her eyes open
to everybody's wants and her ears to their con-
versation. Should the doctor happen in, nothing
would content her but that he should sit in her
chair, while she, dethroned, took the first that
offered opposite. His predicament and his feelings
in the circumstances were well understood by others
of the party, and this may have helped to sustain
him. At all events he bore himself nobly. Henry
James doubtless accepted the distinction in the
same spirit of self-sacrifice, and was rewarded in
like manner by his hostess's gratification. She had
the eyes of a mother for the doctor, a mother with
an only son on whose accomplishments she might
well pride herself, allowing heredity to account for
them. Only once did we see the fair weather ot
her enjoyment of these occasions overcast, and then
— oh, mirabile dictu ! — it was the doctor himself
who raised the wind and caused a squall — with the
best intentions. He had been specially asked to
meet the author of a recently published book in
which he had expressed an interest, the meeting
being designed to give him an opportunity he
4

xlvi PERSONAL SKETCH

desired to discuss the book ; and, thinking to show
his appreciation of the kindness by making the
most of it, he devoted himself to the purpose of the
interview. The book was a long one, with con-
troversial matter in it, and he picked up the points
categorically, with the acumen and accuracy so con-
spicuous, as a rule, by their absence in the reviews of
professional critics. He differed from the author's
views in several important respects, but that only
relieved the discussion from insipidity. There is
help in an impartial difference of opinion, ably
stated, for a writer whose only desire is to arrive
at the truth ; and the author was benefiting. The
rest of the party, interested in the animated dis-
cussion, were silently absorbed in listening, when
from the other side of the table came the plaintive
protest : " Never have you said so much about any
one of my books ! "

It was the woman who spoke, not the authoress.
Give the woman your first consideration, and you
may lavish your subsequent attention on whom you
please — in a matter of the kind.

Our authoress was a great little lady ; there was
nothing petty about her. She delighted in the
success of a colleague per se, even when she was
not in sympathy with his views. News of a fresh
arrival kindled in her the friendliest interest. It
was a happiness to her to help on an aspirant to
literary fame, and she grudged neither time, trouble,

HER ACCENT OF TRUTH xlvii

nor strength for the purpose. She exerted herself
to write to me just before the fatal stroke — her last
letter — on the subject of a first book for which she
was doing her best to help a new writer to find
a publisher. The news that the book had been
accepted reached her on her death-bed, while she
was still conscious enough to understand and show
with a smile that she was glad.

She did not show her interest in young writers
by reading their books. Her way was to set others
to the task, and form her own opinion on a digest ;
and she was seldom out in her estimate. She
detected the brawling conceit of a shallow stream
in one young man who was helping to "debase the
moral currency." If she had lived to hear of him
loudly proclaiming to a companion in the street, for
the information of the passers-by: "We are the
only writers who have any style ! " we should have
had her dry little comment : " I thought so ! "

Vauvenargues was wrong in her case when he
declared that " to praise moderately is a great sign
of mediocrity." She did not pay "handsome com-
pliments," but she spoke with that "accent of truth"
which makes a few words from those who have it
worth treasuring for their weight and meaning.
Genuinely diffident souls, in whom extravagant
flattery only suffices to inspire a passing gleam of
self-confidence and hope, unwarmed by the careful
restraint of her calm assurances, felt themselves

xlviii PERSONAL SKETCH

sent empty away ; yet her sober phrasing had not
failed of its intended effect, as they eventually dis-
covered— by finding the impression a lasting source
of encouragement.

If not one of the greatest, Miss Betham-Edwards
was certainly one of the most remarkable of the
group of distinguished women whom we now call
Mid- Victorian, both in respect to her own interesting
personality and for the long list of her achievements.
She had the high sense of the dignity of her calling,
and of its moral responsibility common to the choicer
spirits of her day. The commercialising of litera-
ture, which is nowadays degrading the pursuit of it
to the level of a sordid trade, was abhorrent to her.
To have tradesmen ordering the product of brains
by the inch ; to be requested to scamp an idea of
its perfect expression in order to make room for
advertisements of scented soaps ; to place the work
of genius itself as a mere adjunct to a display of
the wares of enterprising shopkeepers, she rightly
regarded as a triumph of vulgar materialism blind
even to its own interests, which are best served by
catering for the satisfaction of the spiritual needs of
mankind. She recognised the necessity of providing
for others, which in some cases had subordinated
the artist to the tradesman, and deplored it ; but she
despised mercenariness — the enslavement of mind
to money — when the choice lay between that and
poverty, with liberty for self-expression. She had

WORK AS NOVELIST xHx

no reason to envy anybody their standing, nor did
she — her own was secure. Which is not to say
that she was self-satisfied. Nobody who has the
power of growth still in them is self-satisfied, for
growth is stopped when self-satisfaction sets in.
If she could not flatter herself with the assurance
that she had done the best that could be done, she
was at all events well entitled to rest contented in
the certainty that she had conscientiously done her
best. And she had been fortunate. Talent was
not at a discount in her day as it is in ours, and
she never suffered the blight of incessant rejection.
She came into her own when she was about seven-
teen, and was received with open arms — if Dickens
may be called her own, for it was he who gave her
her first five-pound note for a poem entitled The
Golden Bee. At twenty she succeeded as a novelist
with her first work of fiction. The White House
by the Sea ; and at seventy, at the request of her
publisher, Mr. Reginald Smith, she wrote a novel
— entitled Hearts of Alsace — to celebrate the jubilee
of her working life. In the meantime she had
added to her fame by one novel after another.
Mr. Frederic Harrison mentions Kitty, Dr. Jacob,
John and I, as among her best, but considers that
''A Suffolk Coitrtship, The Lord of the Harvest,
and Mock Beggars Hall have a special value,
even as historic records of 'Old England' in
Corn Law days, and they are worthy to stand

1 PERSONAL SKETCH

beside those of Maria Edgeworth and Mary
Mitford."

In 1898 Miss Betham-Edwards wrote in her
first series of Reminiscences : "Not to many comes
the satisfaction of what may almost be called post-
humous fame," little dreaming that she herself was to
have the still greater gratification of being definitely
ranked as a "classic" in her lifetime by the publica-
tion of her novel, The Lord of the Harvest (first
published in 1889), in The World's Classics, in 19 13.
Up to the present most of her novels have been
reprinted again and again, and are still selling, but
she herself reaped no great monetary benefit from
them. She accepted twenty-five copies in payment
for The White House by the Sea, and never received
a farthing of profit for it, though it is still in print.
Yet she defended the bargain as equitable "for a
young writer."

She was in her eightieth year when the Diamond
Jubilee of her working life was celebrated in 19 17.
In the long retrospect she had nothing to regret
and very much which it must have been good to
remember. Her novels were but a light part of her
output. She had to her credit besides, in the
solider parts, some of the best works ever written
on French life, organisation, and character. In
1 89 1 the French Government, considering that her
writings had materially helped to promote the
sympathy and understanding which resulted in the

HER LITERARY JUBILEE li

Entente Cordiale, made her an Officier de P Instruc-
tion Publique de France. She was, I beHeve, the
first EngHsh officer of the Order. She was also
awarded a gold medal for the nine volumes, pub-
lished over a period of thirty-five years, which
she exhibited in the Palace of Women's Work in
the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908. From the
Government of her own unappreciative country she
received no public recognition whatever ; and she felt
it, for in 19 18 she wrote to me — with a wry smile,
as it were — "My literary Diamond Jubilee 1857-
19 1 8 won't, I fear, bring me my deserts, viz., the
title oi Baroness 2iS2JZQ.oxA^A to Miss Burdett-Coutts.
Any lesser distinction I should refuse, as these are
showered upon grocers, bakers, and candlestick
makers." Happily she had ample private tokens of
respect and affection. Among her regular visitors
to the last were many distinguished men. I never
heard of any particularly distinguished woman paying
her the same pretty attentions in her old age, but
that would not strike her as worth mentioning, she
so very much preferred the men.

The gallant little lady escaped the trial so many
who love their work have had forced upon them in
their declining years, the trial of idleness. We
dreaded the effect of the war on her. We feared
her self-preservative detachment from public affairs
— her attitude of merely interested onlooker — would
not survive the din of battle, the incessant shock

Hi PERSONAL SKETCH

and jar and horror which must certainly invade even
her seclusion. Physically frail as she was there was
no knowing what she might not attempt if she heard
herself called in the cries for help to which hundreds
of thousands of women were everywhere responding
at no matter what cost of suffering to themselves.
Happily, from the height of her detachment she
continued to look down serenely, as the gods look
down, on the follies of men. Her active work in
the world was done, and she was mercifully left to
the repose which had been awarded her on her
Mount Parnassus. Moments of anxiety she had
for the safety of friends in the danger zone ;
moments of grief for the havoc wrought, as on one
occasion when she wrote : "I weep for Rheims
Cathedral as if a star had been darkened in the
heavens"; moments of splendid wrath — short squalls
these, which burst in vigorous language (generally
on a post card), and were immediately succeeded by
sunshine in the next paragraph. In one example,
dated "22/5/18," after tersely condemning the
Huns to eternal perdition in Doric English, the
sun shone (in French) on the prospect of seeing us
soon again : " Enchantee par I'espoir de vous revoir
ici avec la tres chere R. M. T. sitot que la jolie
petite fiancee serait marine. Votre visite, vos visites
je dois dire ici, seront des fetes. Tant d'amis
et d'admirateurs viendraient vous rencontrer. La
fidele E. all 'hop, skip, and jump,' at the thought,

THE WAR Hii

and the dear sofa-ridden at W. Croft will be so
pleased."

Her attitude in regard to the war was early
determined, and, once determined, she mentioned it,
as a rule, as we mention the sorrows of others when
they do not personally concern us. Except when
isolated incidents poignantly affected her, she thought
of it as we had been in the habit of thinking of
remote wars, in China or Peru, her intellect alive
to the tragedy, but her heart untouched — and that
was right and best for her, at her great age — and a
blessing to the friends whose own heavy burden of
anxiety and sorrow was eased by knowing that her
peaceful contemplation from her sitting-room window
of the view she loved — the green slopes, the red
roofs picturesquely huddled below, and the grey
church tower outlined squarely against the change-
ful sea — was untroubled by a too vivid sense of the
horrors that were being enacted out there, just
beyond.

On a card to Miss Tindall, dated " 1/3/15,"
which begins, " Do write that cleverly suggested
paper — how the war affects individuals " — she goes
on to say : " The war does not affect me either in
mental or bodily powers — the reverse, for I look to
it as a universal moral, religious, and intellectual
purifier — the dawn (I may not live to see) of a new
(lay) religion."

That expression — "a new (lay) religion" —

liv PERSONAL SKETCH

loosely used because she knew it was safe not to
be misunderstood, may be thought to savour of
materialism. Judging from many passages in her
works such an assumption would be incorrect. Mr.
Frederic Harrison, writing in the Positivist Review,
February 19 19, says:

Her close friendship with French Protestants
and with leaders of the Voltairian parties made her
an uncompromising opponent of the Catholic Church
and of clerical teaching. And she was hardly less
tolerant of the Anglican Church and its schools.
For practical purposes she alluded to the principles
which this Review maintains, and was in intimate
fellowship with its founders and principal con-
tributors. At the same time, the Voltairian strain
in her creed and sympathies withheld her from any
formal co-operation with our body. We often found
her a zealous fellow-worker, and always a sym-
pathetic friend, whilst she maintained a keen inde-
pendence in judgment, held on to a passionate
belief in her heroes and causes, and by temperament
and training was averse to any type of religious

ororanisation.

This is admirably true of her as far as it goes,
but it does not go far enough. She quarrelled
with the Established Church for being a political
institution — "that branch of the Civil Service
usually called the Church of England," Lord
Houghton's witticism, she habitually quoted on
subject — instead of being, as it should be, the

RELIGION Iv

the Fountainhead of Pure Christianity. Which is
not to suesfest that she would have belonged to it
even if it had been her ideal of a religious body.
The nonconformity in her blood rendered her averse
from organisations of every kind ; but equally in
her blood was Christianity itself — "Christianity,
untravestied, unadulterated by Councils and Synods,
St. Augustines and St. Athanasiuses." "Theology
and theologians have never possessed the slightest
attraction for me," she says in her first published
Reminiscences (p. 339). But theology is not religion ;
neither is ecclesiasticism. History teems with
examples of religious evolution fettered by the
tyrannous application of the shackles of dogma,
and of the pursuit of truth barred by ecclesiastical
intolerance at every step. Religion so hampered is
like a forest tree grown in a flower-pot, dwarfed
and deformed. Superstition has done its worst to
impede progress in every department of life, but
only in this, the most important of all, seeing that
upon the enlightened conduct of it hinges the
worth-while of all else — has superstition succeeded,
by blocking inquiry, in checking the acquisition of
knowledge and its sane application. The fatal
result is that the human race, grown out of the
fairy tales which sufficed for its childhood and
forbidden to replace them by the stronger pabulum
for which it is ripe, is being spiritually starved by
the restriction. Miss Betham-Edwards expressed

Ivi PERSONAL SKETCH

herself on this subject courageously : "No music
ravishes my ears as that of the Salvation Army,"
she says. " Those hearty strains, heard every
Sunday, never fail to stir my pulse with purest
rapture. For do they not remind me of our hardly
acquired religious liberty, the right enjoyed by
every English subject to save or damn himself
as he pleases, to regard his salvation, so called, as
purely a personal affair as that of choosing a partner
in life or a career ! "

She was not triumphing here in the special form
in which "religious liberty" found self-expression,
but in its escape from enslavement. It is significant
that, of all the influences she came under in her
friendships with distinguished men of all shades of
opinion, the following is the one she most gratefully
acknowledged :

"A millionaire, as I have always deemed myself
in the matter of friendships, how was my capital
diminished by the loss of this most beloved and
worthily-beloved man ! Some of our friends em-
bellish our lives, others build up, one or two beatify.
Neither a flower, melody, nor palmer's staff was the
close friendship of Dr. Wilson ; instead a Scripture,
plain to read, bearing the incontestible stamp of
finer spirits, souls, in the words of Plato and Spinoza,
exempt from the lot of mortality." She goes on to
quote as the "keynote of Dr. Wilson's character

EMOTION OF THE SOUL IvH

struck in early life": . . . "Thank God, we have
still a leaven of manly Christian devotion in the
world's lump of vexatious vanity ; we may yet hope
to see our national worship in spirit and in truth
within the walls of our churches, where, upon a
broad level, rich and poor, old and young, learned
and simple, may bow down as brethren in the
presence of the God and Father of us all. Here
mioht be a reknittino- of that bond of union which is
the bond of strength in our social system, now bound
by a rope of sand . . . the Alpha and Omega, the
beginning and the end of practical Christianity
realised in our lives as professed upon our lips." —
Reminiscences, pp. 335-6.

This passage may or may not embody her own
hopes. She makes no comment on it. But that
was her way when she approved ; it was when she
disagreed that she had most to say. Mysticism
intrigued her mind, and intellectually she appeared
to have the limited outlook of the scientific material-
ist ; but spiritually she was better informed. She
could not have written her poems without having
experienced " the delightful bathing of the soul in
emotions which overpass the outlines of definite
thought " — in which her great contemporary George
Eliot's mind was washed clean of its doubts.
Essentially honest as she was, she would not have
republished, towards the end of her life (1907),

Iviii PERSONAL SKETCH

hymns full of childlike faith, if she had ceased to
believe in the God to whom they were addressed

" In grief, perplexity, or pain
None ever go to Thee in vain :
Thou makest life a joy again,
God of the weary,"

would have been ruthlessly deleted if it had ceased
to be true of her personal experience. The intellect
may faithfully describe its acquirements in words,
but spiritual perceptions, real as they are to the
individual, transcend his powers of expression. It
is not an uncommon thing for this difficulty to be
evaded by making no effort to subordinate intel-
lectual experience, which consists in the acquisition
of secular learning, with the spiritual intuitions with
which the soul would have mankind value the pro-
duct of their minds. Advanced thinkers who are
guilty of this evasion tell us sometimes naively that
they have to keep their " faith " apart in a " separate
water-tight compartment " or they would lose it.
There it remains unvisited, but at all events safe
and intact ; but its growth is stopped, so that, at the
end of their lives, they are spiritually no further
advanced than they were at their mother's knee.
Childlike faith is beautiful at any age, but

"... his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all . . . "

is felt by the more courageous, probably because, in

A NATURAL SECRETION lix

their own case, the effect of putting it to the touch
was to prove that the danger was imaginary. In
too many instances there is reason to mourn the lack
of enterprise in this direction which has resulted in
the loss to the individual and to the world of all
that must have accrued had he seen to it that his
spiritual evolution kept pace with his intellectual
development.

Miss Betham-Edwards' religion was a natural
secretion of her heredity and an integral part of her
being. Like the circulation of her blood, it per-
formed its function without attracting special atten-
tion on her part to itself. She was reticent on the
subject, even to Dr. Hessey, to whom, if to any one,
she was most likely to have expressed herself pre-
cisely if she had arrived at any precise conclusion.
His cultivated psychological sense may be trusted to
have formed an accurate diagnosis of her spiritual
state from fugitive symptoms, and he could only
say, in answer to a question on the subject of her
apprehension of a life to come, " I know that she
had no fear of the future, though her ideas on the
subject were extraordinarily primitive. She would
rarely talk on the subject, but sometimes she would
lead me on, and then one had to walk warily."
Taking his "primitive" to mean the same as my
" childlike," we agree in our main conclusion in
regard to the faith of our friend.

But if transcendentally her outlook was nebulous.

Ix PERSONAL SKETCH

ethically it was clearly defined. She rejoiced in the
belief "that one of the greatest changes of the
Victorian era is a progressive moral standard."
She perceived that the advance of mankind depends
not on scientific discoveries, mechanical inventions,
artistic triumphs, or commercial success, but on the
conquest of their misery-making propensities by the
development of their sense of moral obligation. In
the conduct of her own life she set a courageous
example. In her childhood she had turned to the
right, and she kept straight on to the end of her
days, however toilsome the way. Her rectitude is
as apparent in her work as it was in her social
relations. She verified the smallest detail and
scrupulously gave the name of every author to
whom she was indebted, even for a phrase. All her
affairs were regulated with the same punctilious
probity, and every obligation punctually met. De-
cency and order were the rule of her life. In her
last will and testament she showed her habitual
consideration for others by doing herself everything
that she could do to save them trouble. Her direc-
tions were explicit and had only to be carried out.
She guarded her dignity both in the disposal of her
property and in the arrangements she made for
the final disposal of her mortal remains. Emily
provided for, her one cause for anxiety was removed,
and she could face what was to come in undisturbed
peace of mind. In her time she had been wiser

THE LAST DAYS Ixi

than either ant or cigale. One-sidedness had robbed
the ant of pleasure in the present and the cigale of
safety in the future. Our friend, better balanced,
had divided her time between work and play. The
one helping the other, she enjoyed both to the top
of her bent, and at the same time laid in a rich store
of pleasant recollections upon which to browse when
strength failed for the continuous active pursuit of
either. It is good to think of her in the long
precious hours she spent in happy contemplation,
sitting out of doors, as we sometimes saw her, in
summer, her face beautifully serene, with just that
touch of melancholy upon it in repose which is
proper to the autumn of life as to the autumn of the
year. Content with what she had, satisfied with
what she had accomplished, still able to exercise the
gifts she had used to such good purpose all her life,
out of the crowd but surrounded by devoted friends,
the sun may be said to have shone on her through-
out the winter of her days till the last.

She declined so gently that no great change in
her was observable until 191 8. She had been ailing
the previous year, but her mind was as active as
ever. The following post card is characteristic :

Villa Julia, Hastings,
19/11/17.

Who wrote The Schonberg Cotta Family, etc.
etc., Mid- Victorian and a woman .-* See the;.other
5

Ixii PERSONAL SKETCH

side. Will answer y' long letter soon. But I have
been in bed for several days with cold (or influenza),
and only now get half-way downstairs, but hope to
begin work to-morrow. The Dr. all cheerfulness
and devotion. Yes, as Voltaire said, "Work drives
away disease, crime, and ennuis Shall look forward
to your next. Induce our friend to stick for the
present to the petites nouvelles which she does so
well. Romans must be short, full of incident and
cheerful nowadays, and not too conversational and
philosophical, a rattling short story is the thing.
Puis-je etre utile a elle re short story or novel.
I began H. J.'s [Henry James] " Middle Y■^^" but as
I am writing a short biographical novel (date 1 864)
... I am sending the book back ?/?2read to Mudie,
fearful of catching that delightful (in his case) in-
volved style but terrible if caught. ... I find that it
is H. James' " Sense of the Past " I tried to read and
couldn't, and I remember now that I did read the
passages about G. Eliot in "The Middle Y"."

The early part of 191 8 tried her, but in March
she wrote buoyantly :

" Haven't been out of the house for months this
y''. Out once and then slipped down on wet cobble
stones — no harm done but a litde shaken. Quite
well now and just finishing a set of fire-eating short
stories (autobiographical) of Germany and France.
If the Huns get here I shall be shot, that's certain.
Have you read the life of Wilkes — a terrible dis-
reputable ; but oh ! to have half, a quarter, a grain
of his never failing wit ! "

A LAST VISIT Ixiii

We saw her last in July 191 8, and found a
difference in her, but accounted for it hopefully as
the temporary effect of the fall, which had been a
greater shock than she pretended. Her memory
did not fail her, but it responded tardily to her calls
upon it. She had often to pause till the word or
name or quotation she wanted recurred to her.
Loss of memory to this extent is a common ex-
perience during convalescence, we reminded each
other. She did revive afterwards, for our friends,
Mr. and Mrs. Coulson Kernahan, had tea with her
only a week or two before she was stricken, and
Mr. Kernahan reported that they had "found her
talking as animatedly, as shrewdly, and as wittily as
ever. When we threatened to report her to the
Food Controller for the sumptuousness of her table,
she retorted, ' When I can't afford to ask old friends
to tea I'll invite them to morning prayers.' "

We had the happiness of being her only guests
on that last occasion, but all the usual dear little
ceremonies were strictly observed. Taxis being
"off" on account of the war, we had thankfully
taken to a little public omnibus known to us as
" Black Maria," which plied at set times between
the station and the foot of High Wickham hill.
When it was time to go the little lady parted from
us on the doorstep, with a confident au revoir !

As we walked down the green hill in front of
the house we had one last glimpse of her standing

Ixiv PERSONAL SKETCH

at her sitting-room window waving her handkerchief
and watching us out of sight. There was a sorrow-
ful foreboding in each of our hearts which made us
determine to waste no opportunities we might have
of seeing her again ; but, alas for us ! visits had to
be postponed for one reason and another, to our
abiding regret, until it was too late. Her last card
to " Dearest Rachel Mary " ends joyously :

** Lovingest greetings to both from

Base and degrading 'Tilda.

Mid- Victorian Memories out in June. Diamond
Jubilee Edition of The White House by the Sea,
(1857-1918), forthcoming got up regardless of
expense.

" Emily's best love and duty to both dear ladies."

She had corrected the proofs of Mid- Victorian
Memories and begun a new novel, which she told
us was to have " the ineffable title of Bitter Sweet " ;
and she had yet another novel projected with a title
which was too thrilling to be confided to us in
writing, but we were to hear all about it after
Christmas, when, for certain, our promised visit was
to have been paid. Long before the date she had
fixed for it, alas ! little hope was left us of ever
seeing her on earth again. The fatal illness began
with a stroke on the 8th December 19 18. On the
4th January 19 19, at twenty minutes to four in the
afternoon, she breathed her last.

"LOVING THANKS" Ixv

She faced death as she had faced life : " Tell
my friends that I am quite cheerful, and tell the
doctor that I never lose my good spirits. I mean
to keep them to the end " — were the last messages
she sent us. Her last words were "loving thanks"
to Emily and Mrs. Ransome — her " two guardian
angels," as she called them — for all they had done
for her to smooth the last little bit of the way.
There were to have been " no flowers," but ours had
been sent before we were told ; and we were glad on
Emily's account as well as our own, for it would
have hurt to think the cloistered austerity of the
room in which she lay was unrelieved by a single
token of faithful affection. Emily decided in the
matter as she had been in the habit of deciding for
the good of her lady in other matters in which they
had differed. " I had to give my dear lady your
beautiful flowers," she wrote pathetically. "She
looks so sweet."

When all was over Dr. Hessey wrote to Miss
Tindall : "We shall all miss the dear little lady
immensely. It has been a great privilege to have
known her so intimately. Hers was an extra-
ordinarily clear mind acting through a remarkable
brain. I feel I owe her much.

" After her stroke, which affected her right arm
and leg, she remained almost her usual self for some
time and took a great interest in her letters, and was
always pleased and interested in seeing me and

Ixvi PERSONAL SKETCH

Mrs. Darent Harrison — I did not allow any one else
to see her — who went in to read to her occasionally,
but gradually she failed, and during the last few
days she was practically unconscious and gently
faded away. One cannot be too thankful that life
here was not prolonged. . . . For her to have lived
on with an enfeebled brain would have been a
tragedy."

A brave successful life ending in a brave happy
death is good to think upon, and this is our comfort
in the present. We do "all miss the dear little lady
immensely." We do all "feel that we owe her
much." We grieve for that we have looked our
last upon her in this earth-life, but we do not grieve
as for one who is lost to us for ever. She has only
gone on before a little distance, for a little while ;
and when our time comes and we too pass on
through the Gate of Death, we have no fear but
that she will meet us on the Other Side, with little
hands outstretched, and in her eyes the silent
welcome of a great joy.

SARAH GRAND.

MID- VICTORIAN MEMORIES

COVENTRY PATMORE

" The Angel in the House" the late Professor
Beesly said to me a few years ago, " is a book that
ought to be put into the hands of every young man
on entering Hfe."

Could higher praise be coveted by any poet?
I am sorry that Coventry Patmore did not live to
hear the compliment, all the more piquant coming
as it did from a brand not to be snatched from the
burning. That is to say, was he or anyone else logical
where theological matters lie nearest their hearts ?

Taking him all in all, my neighbour and intimate
friend was far and away the most original figure in
these memorabilia.

From the crown of his head to the sole of his
foot a rank medisevalist, he was born several
centuries too late. He ought to have been a con-
temporary of Saint Simeon Stylites, who spent
thirty years on a pillar seventy-two feet high and

2 COVENTRY PATMORE

four feet square at the top — a pretty tight residence
for a Hfetime ! — or at least of Saint Francis d'Assisi
five centuries later, who walked a whole day through
a forest, forgetting all the time where he was; had
he been told in a brickfield, he would of course have
assented.

More justifiably perhaps than Jean Paul Richter
might Coventry Patmore be styled " the only one."
The German prose poet, after all, was not out of
place in the eighteenth-century Fatherland. The
other seemed a contemporary of Dante, Calderon,
even of the Troubadours ; little indeed of the
Victorian grentleman was there about him but his
dress. The Franciscan garb in which he chose to
be buried symbolised mediaevalism of life and
character. With Don Quixote, Coventry Patmore
had come into the world three hundred years too
late. Our epoch, so he perpetually lamented,
possessed neither distinction, romance, nor mag-
nanimous opportunity. Sorry medium indeed for
any child of song ! Yet so ruthless is the logic of
facts, his best — may we not aver, his only enduring
work ? — belongs essentially to the modern spirit he
repudiated !

The writer who is not of his own epoch is
identifiable with none. Mysticism here had dried
the springs of artless fancy. A unique, a brilliant
personality remained. The sweet singer in Israel
was lost to the world.

HOME AND WIFE 3

It was in 1868 that the poet relinquished
his post at the British Museum, married a rich
woman, and settled at Hastings, in a house, as he
told me, he had coveted all his life. This was
a fine mansion at the foot of the East Hill, Built
by the fourfold-wedded Lady Waldegrave, the
house seemed a veritable shrine of matrimony, a
roof-tree under Hymen's especial patronage. The
second Mrs. Patmore now installed as mistress
was one of Cardinal Manning's wealthiest and
most devout converts, who not only swallowed her
new creed whole but would fain have had it of
much stronger mediaeval flavour, as the tragedy of
her end will show. Stepmotherhood was not field
wide enough for the handsome, imperious mistress
of old Hastings House. She should have been an
abbess of some convent famed for its asceticism.

A noble old house it is, Georgian in date, its
red brick frontage beautified by a trellised magnolia,
stretchinor on the left and raised higrh above the
road, possessing a spacious, well-wooded pleasaunce
— garden hardly seems an adequately descriptive
word. Few such dwellings are to be found near
a large town nowadays, and the new tenant of The
Mansion, as it was then called, revelled in a sense
of amplitude, retirement, and dignity. Dignity,
indeed, characterised the poet's household ; dis-
tinction was the atmosphere that he brought with
him.

4 COVENTRY PATMORE

It was soon after the poet's settling-down that
I was invited to a luncheon given in honour of the
event. On entering the drawing-room, my eyes
immediately rested on a sumptuous woman stand-
ing in the centre of a group ; she wore over her
black satin dress a gold chain, not round her neck,
but, doubtless with some fantastic meaning, en-
circling her waist. But what at once struck
observers was her beaming look of triumph.
Well, indeed, from her point of view, might she
triumph ! Had not the Cardinal's convert been
the means of bringing not only her poet, but those
belonging to him, within the pale of Rome ? That
beaming look was always there. A cultivated
woman of the world, an ardent devote, she saw
everything from one standpoint only. Gracious-
ness she was itself, and fond of society, as she
frankly admitted. Upon one occasion, when we
had discussed theological questions, fearing that
she had not made her meaning transparent, she
wrote to me that same evening : ** You will under-
stand me when I say that I have more fellow-
feeling with an ignorant, dirty old Breton peasant
woman who belongs to my religion than with
any outsider, no matter how gifted." The word
"timid" occurs in Mr. Gosse's three or four lines
of characterisation.^ Never did any woman pos-
sess a more imperious will than the second

* See his delightful monograph, Coventry Patmore.

CONVERSION TO ROME 5

Mrs. Patmore ; never did any more completely
wield "all the rule, one umpire." Thus for many
years Coventry Patmore submitted to both spiritual
and domestic sway. The autocratic rule of his
household during that period was strictly a feminine
one.

Days of struggle, material and spiritual, were
well over. Wedded to a rich, handsome, and in
every respect sympathetic wife, with herself, for
once and for all, he became an ardent Romanist.
Coventry Patmore's lines were now cast in pleasant
places. But prosperous circumstances left him in
one respect what he had ever been. Like Shake-
speare's Thersites/ he always loved to be " where
wit was stirring." To him, as to rare Ben Jonson,
a keen wit was dear as his nutriment. The Open
Sesame of The Mansion was lively intellect, mental
alertness, suggestiveness : rank, opulence, fashion
could not turn the key. Within its walls you
breathed an atmosphere of literary eclecticism and
simple refinement.

Frank, informal hospitality characterised the
fine old house with the magnolias. One pleasant
visit was made with a dear Scottish friend, the late
Dr. Japp. Just twenty years ago, when staying at
Hastings, the co-editor of Good Words expressed
a wish to make Coventry Patmore's acquaintance.

' " I will keep where there is wit stirring and leave the faction of
fools." — Troilus and Cressida^ Act ll., Scene i.

6 COVENTRY PATMORE

On asking permission to introduce my guest, came
an immediate invitation to lunch, or rather early
dinner. Much enlivening conversation we had at
table, and much more doubtless had the two men
after they had retired for a tUe-a-tUe and a pipe.
In a little volume of poems published for private
circulation, I find that Dr. Japp commemorated the
day, August 12, 1888, by writing two sonnets, in
one of which occurs the line :

" Sweet brotherhood, made one by sorrow's seal."

The duologue had perhaps turned upon subjects
too sad and solemn for the family board.

Coventry Patmore delighted to give people
little shocks. One day at table, all present being
fellow-converts to Romanism but myself, he burst
out with : " Nothing is a greater mistake than to
think that religion makes folks happy : it makes
them miserable. Look at my own case. I had
planned a delightful little spree in town with X."
(naming a boon companion). "We were going to
see this, that, and the other, and have a scrumptious
lunch together at the Criterion, when lo ! I dis-
covered that the day fixed was Friday, a fast day !
So I had to telegraph to X. and mope at home
over eggs and potatoes."

He set as much store by genial intercourse as
did Montaigne. Whilst living at the beautiful old
house at Hastings, a kind of a Harold Skimpole

A NEW SKIMPOLE 7

from America contrived to make the poet's ac-
quaintance. " I said to myself," he told me,
" ' My fine fellow, you are worth fifty pounds to
me ; beyond that I shall not go.' He was very
good company, and used to tell me most amus-
ing stories of his own adventures in different
parts of the world by the yard, not a word of
any, I'll vouch for it, being true. I paid some
of his bills for him, but when he asked a loan
of several hundred pounds I wished him good
day.

" That fellow was one of the cleverest I ever
came across," Mr. Patmore continued. "One day
in the early part of our acquaintance he came to
me for advice. His wife had purchased a costume
at one of the principal local drapers, but when an
assistant was sent for to make certain alterations
she packed it up and carried it back to the shop.
What should he do ? * Go to Z.,' I said,
naming my lawyer ; and off he started. ' Summon
the people,' said Z. ; 'that is what you had better
do. But wait — have you paid for the dress ? If not,
send a cheque and summon them afterwards.' ' On
my word, I never thought of that,' exclaimed the
other innocently ; * and as I don't happen to have
my purse, just oblige me with your cheque for the
amount.' And I'll be hanged," added Coventry
Patmore, chuckling, "if he didn't bamboozle the
lawyer. Instead of stepping over the way, he went

8 COVENTRY PATMORE

straight home. The dress was never paid for, and
Z. never got back his money ! "

To the very last Coventry Patmore worshipped
at the shrine of grace and beauty. A few years
before he died he was introduced to a charming
young lady at my house, and whenever we met
afterwards he became dithyrambic about her. She
married a little later, and I begged his autograph
for a copy of his poems I had bought as a wedding-
gift. He thus quoted himself under a pretty
inscription :

" Nature to you was more than kind.
What fond perversity to dress
So much simplicity of mind

In such a weaUh of loveliness ! "

But the compliment was felt to be overwhelming,
and the volume did not appear with the other
wedding gifts.

•' The waters of Shiloh that go softly " were to be
rudely disturbed. The Mansion had changed hands,
and was wanted as a residence by its new owner.
All the heavier fell the blow because over against
his much-loved home Coventry Patmore had raised
a handsome church in memory of his second wife,
thus creating a little Catholic centre, in which he
naturally occupied a foremost place. He had made
many friends, too, among non-Catholics, and loved
the quaint old seaboard town. Hastings also re-
gretted the loss of the poet. Cassell's threepenny

LISTENER AND TALKER 9

edition of The Angel hi the House had popularised
the poem among all classes. The townsfolk would
turn to gaze on the tall, attenuated, erect figure in
black velvet with the striking countenance as he
stalked along, holding by the hand a miniature of
himself, the little son born of his third marriage.
There were keen regrets on both sides. The poet
forfeited an ideal abode : Hastings lost distinction.
But the thing had to be done, and after much
painful journeying to and fro a suitable retreat
^r one so fastidious was found at Lymington. The
house, flanked by an old-world garden, overlooked
the Solent, and was roomy, irregular, and secluded
— a very fair substitute for the Georgian mansion
with the magnolia. One drawback was the distance
from the little church, which had to be reached by
a ferry-boat. Shortly after the family installation,
I was invited for a few days, and memorable days
they were. Never had I found Coventry Patmore
in livelier, more paradoxical mood, more thoroughly
himself. As good a listener as he was a talker,
he always spurred on other folk's wits ; and although
a bottomless gulf of antipodean opinion divided us,
we loved each other dearly.

He would say to me when I was his guest,
" Now come into my study, and have a pipe and
a glass of beer." The pipe and glass might be
declined, but the tete-a-tete was, of course, irre-
sistible. A first-rate story-teller, full of literary

lo COVENTRY PATMORE

reminiscence, an original and epigrammatic but
wayward critic, Coventry Patmore only needed a
suggestive remark or apt question, and his talk
would flow in a brilliant unbroken stream. As the
blue tobacco fumes curled upwards, and the strange,
lank, sardonic figure of the speaker became partly
obscured, his listener would forget the man in the
potency of the voice — a voice mysterious, penetrat-
ing, Dantesque, belonging not to one of ourselves,
but to the olden time, an echo of the grand old
days, "the days that are no more."

Here are a few jottings, mere crumbs from the
rich man's table, which may give some idea of his
table-talk. He had known Carlyle well, and was
fond of talking about him. "Why," I asked one
evening, "should Carlyle have written his French
Revolution in the chaotic, parenthetic style of Jean
Paul Richter, every sentence being a Chinese
puzzle?" "Why?" he replied. "Because to put
all that he had to say in clear, matter-of-fact prose
would have required twenty pages instead of one.
His book suited the theme : it is in itself a
revolution ! "

"The lack of our age is distinction," he said
at another time. " What opportunity is there
in these days for heroism, or in literature for
really great work ? Writers cannot say what they
would. Some of the great books of the world
are coarse. Look at Othello, Dante, Calderon —

AS NOVEL-READER ii

who in the present time could dare to write as
freely ? "

Then, sadly enough, he went on to tell me
that the manuscript of a mystical poem — his best
work, he considered it — had lately been burnt.

" My spiritual adviser, Father , disapproved of

publication," he added, with a rueful face and deep-
drawn sigh.

It was in the modern novel that Coventry
Patmore found mental recreation, not in stories
written with a purpose, but in natural pictures of
life. The super-sensuous, psychological fiction
now in fashion had not as yet supplanted former
ideals, and would most assuredly have been
anathematised by the poet. With one or two
startling exceptions, the lady novelists of the
Victorian epoch were his favourite reading. To
the Bronte sisters he was whimsically antipathetic.
On the other hand, he once said to me, " I could
name a hundred novels of our day each in its
way as perfect as Paradise Lost,'" singling out for
praise several women writers. The authoress of
The Atelier du Lys had his suffrages, among
others.

Coventry Patmore ever proved the inspiring
and inspired in such a milieu.

Who else could have thus paraphrased the
second William's telegram to his spouse after
Sedan ? Was Punch ever relished as was the
6

12 COVENTRY PATMORE

number containing his famous parody of that pietistic
monarch's message to his wife ?

"Thank the Lord, my dear Augusta,
We have fought the French a buster,
Ten thousand Frenchmen sent below.
Praise Him from whom all blessings flow."

Like the fat boy in Pickwick, Coventry Patmore
loved to make folk's flesh creep. Thus I remember
when a guest at the beautiful old house, his last
home, near Lymington, a small dinner-party was
given in my honour, the company consisting of
neighbouring gentry, county families, as the phrase
goes ; that is to say, squires and squiresses of the
most rigid gentility — dullish company, one would
deem, for a poet and a wit. As wine was being
handed round, he blurted out :

"After all that is said and done, the best drink
out and out is gin and water."

The horrification of his guests may be imagined.
Had he turned mad on the spot they could not have
shuddered more.

Despite his set resolve to live mentally in the
Dark Ages — in other words, be a model convert
worthy of his converter, rather I should say per-
verter — Coventry Patmore could not divest himself
of his humour, savoir vivre, and chivalrous devotion
to women and beauty.

And here I cannot resist an amusinof incident.
When meeting the poet at my house, my cousin,

EXCESSIVE DEVOTION 13

Amelia B. Edwards, after eyeing him front and
back with a glance at his shoulders, asked, with
well - affected disillusion, " But where are his
wings ? " This reference to The Angel in the
House pleased the poet mightily. A most animated
group were my guests, and many happy and witty
good things they said, but as hostess I was too
distracted to store them up. For it is not every
day that a most famous Egyptologist and a popular
poet can be brought together, and I had gathered
as many friends as my small drawing-rooms would
hold, to share the privilege with me.

" My second wife brought me so many thousand
pounds" (I do not venture on figures), Patmore
would confide to his friends, and the unkind and
uuspoken comment — at least of one listener — was
that she was very dear at the money. But her
wealth, of course, did not alter by one jot the
simplicity of home life. With it was built and
endowed the church of St. Mary Star-of-the-Sea,
and doubtless increasing and cementing the small
Catholic colony in the south coast. But, zealous
to set a personal as well as a public example of
religious enthusiasm, the poor lady soon after fell
a victim to excessive devotion. On some special
day in the Romish calendar, without breaking her
fast she set out for St. Leonards, attending service
in the little church there, a six-mile walk to and
fro. Reaching home, she dropped down in a faint.

14 COVENTRY PATMORE

and her clothes had to be cut piecemeal from her
lifeless body.

A very agreeable woman of the world but for
pietistic ostentation was the second Mrs. Patmore,
and a still more engaging figure was her successor,
who gave her husband a son in his old age.

A curious pair they made as they sauntered
along hand in hand, the little fellow a curiously
old-looking child and the very image of his father,
but an apt little chap, and he was very quick at
putting two and two together.

" Why, papa, you are half as bad as Henry
the Eighth," he broke out with one day, and other
sallies are recorded of him.

Had the exquisite poem, "The Toys," any
foundation in fact ?

"My little Son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise."

Had he ever stirred his elderly father and boon
companion to anger? Those who saw them and
knew them together cannot believe it. Anyhow,
" The Toys " is one of those simple effusions that
few can read with dry eyes. And that line :

" His Mother, who was patient, being dead,"

how it throbs with feeling and pathos !

"You must pay us another visit in the summer,"
was Coventry Patmore's charge as I quitted the
hospitable house in the Solent.

IN MEMORY GREEN 15

But before the summer came he was borne to
his last rest in the monastic garb symbolising not
the sweet story-teller in verse, but the mystic whose
most cherished work had been condemned by priestly
counsel to an auto-da-fd\

If the gaiety of nations was not eclipsed by
the death of Coventry Patmore, the town which he
had distinguished by residence keeps his memory
green. Not, certainly, after the good French
fashion. With ourselves, little except military or
naval history is inculcated by street nomenclature.
The poet's seaside home has as yet no street
named after him, but an admirable likeness hangs
in the local museum.

A last word about my old friend, to whom in
one sense I was anathema, a brand not to be
snatched from the burning, in another a cherished
friend and companion.

If he drew tears from my eyes, I was happy
in being repaid by smiles from his lips. On a
sixpenny edition of Kitty, I am proud to read
on the first leaf this fine compliment of a poet
whose opus viagmmi is no less alive :

""Kitty is a classic. I have read it over and
Coventry Patmore, 1907."

II

MR. FREDERIC HARRISON

HALF A CENTURY'S FRIENDSHIP

What a subject have I here, more than full enough
for a volume, and only to be inadequately dealt with
in a monograph, a paper suited to The Quarterly or
Edinburgh Review.

My intercourse, personal and on paper, with
the last of the great Victorians and the doyen of
letters throughout the Edwardian and Georgian
periods until the present time, began more than
fifty years ago. Proudly, indeed, do I enter upon
a record so full of interest to the general reader
and so fruitful to myself At every stage I am
brought face to face with momentous events and
phases of thought, political, social, and religious
problems long since solved, for better or for worse.
And the more closely I survey the delightful task
before me, the more incompetent do I feel in dealing
with it. For I cannot aver of myself, as of my
illustrious and, by five years, my senior contem-
porary, that I am still in the plenitude of bodily
as of mental vigour. Time, on the whole, has dealt

j6

FRIENDSHir 17

very kindly with me. In the diamond jubilee of
my literary career — 1857-1918 — I enjoy entire
immunity from "that which doth accompany old
age," defective hearing, vision, and perception. Nor
can I complain of what is even worse to bear —
namely, slights and oblivion. No more generous
body exists than the novel-reading public. New-
comers, however brilliant their d^but, however
numerous their editions, do not husde old favourites
off the stage. A novelist whose first work attains
the rank of a classic, modest although it be and
modest as may have been its author's emoluments,
cannot arraign Fortune.

Friendships equally with achievements make
red letters in our calendar. How I wish that I
had put down in writing the exact date and precise
circumstances of first encountering kindred and
inspiring souls, those men and women who have
straightway enriched life and opened new fields
of thouofht and endeavour. The aftermath is re-
membered, the spot on which fell the handful of
seed is forgotten. Fortunately, Mr. Frederic
Harrison's memory is better than my own. On
referring the subject to him, he writes :

My very dear Matilda, — I am on holiday —
at last — having read and passed for press within
the last five to six weeks my book of 460 pp. and
four Review articles, and written piles of MS. on
various matters. So I take a quarto page, a new

i8 FREDERIC HARRISON

pen, and my most amiable spirit to reply to your
very grateful letters. My memory holds out still,
and I have a rough diary of mere incidents and
movements posted up since the year 1829, the year
in fact of my parents' marriage. [N.B. — From
1829 until 1847 these entries were from my father's
books of accounts. He entered every 6d. of ex-
penses from setting up house, and I have those
books now. My wife, in Tke Cornhill Magazine^
wrote a most interesting paper on the habits of an
early Victorian household out of these diaries, and
I used them in my own AtUobiographical Memoirs,
vol. i. ch. i.) So your inquiry as to our first
meeting. It was in July 1890. We were then
passing the summer in our cottage — Blackdown
Cottage, Haslemere, in Sussex, not in Surrey, an
old cottage and farm on the Blackdown, which is
1030 feet high (not Hindhead, which is eight miles
off in Surrey). Our pretty old place stood 800 feet
above sea, and had magnificent views over the
Weald of Sussex, four miles from Haslemere
Station, and one mile from Aldworth, Tennyson's
summer house. Why you wrote to me, and why
you so kindly promised to visit us, you know
better than I. Anyhow, we were proud to have
you as a guest. We sent our man and carriage
to fetch you from Haslemere. Our coachman,
Williams, after twenty - four years' service with
us, is now driving a great motor omnibus in
London.

Yes, it was twenty-eight years ago when I
had the happiness to hand out a bright and smiling

WORK AND A PHONOGRAPH 19

lady who seemed to be on the right side of fifty.
It was love — i.e. lifelong friendship — at first sight,
and we have been lovers, in the sense of close and
intimate friends in thought, ever since. We spent
a happy day rambling about that timbered hill
with our daughter, not quite four, and with Bernard,
not quite nineteen, from his first year and the
Studio in Paris. How well I remember that visit !
Now for replies.

As I said, my articles were in first numbers of
the three Reviews, Fortnightly, Nineteenth Century,
the third is The Positivist Review. It (the P.R.)
contains 32 pp. every month, words of wisdom —
from others as well as mine. In 191 7, the Review
contained each month my " Thoughts on Govern-
ment," being a reissue of Part I. of my Order
and Progress, 1875. This present year, 19 18,
it contained my (new) " Moral and Religious
Socialism," which began in May and continued up
to August. These two years contained a pro-
foundly full summary of the entire political and
economic synthesis according to the Gospel of
Augustus Comte. They were as lucid as they
were philosophic, not from my own ability but
from the truths of the Master. I am only the
phonograph. But all this — purely gratuitous —
indeed, was published at our own cost — was utterly
unheeded, unknown, and buried. Not even friends
would spend their pennies in getting it. Probably
only two or three score people read it, and only
two or three of these quite understood and accepted
it. All pure waste in our lifetime. Yet by

20 FREDERIC HARRISON

2018 A.D., or say a.h. i, these little pieces will
be held to be as well worth study as, say, Burke
on the Revolution or his " Thoughts on the Present
Discontents," People will read any chatter, short
stories at 6s., and will buy dozens of picture papers
at IS. each, but will not give 3d.^ for real wisdom.
My life is spent in pouring out precious wine into
glasses without bottoms, so that all runs into the
sewer.^ . . . My first visit to the East was from
October i to November 1890 — to Constantinople,
Athens, and Rome. Lectured on Homer at
Newton Hall on November 2, the day after my
return from sight of Troas ; lecture almost ex-
tempore, now in my Among my Books, 19 12, ch.
viii. On November 15 I lectured on Athens at
Toynbee Hall. This is now in my Meaning of
History, 1894, ch. x., and it is one of the most
suggestive things I ever wrote. (N.B. — John
Morley was reading it in the train coming from
London to Bath the other day, and highly praised
it as real history.) So that not everything I write
passes like "bubbles in the air." Theopkano was
in twelve numbers of The Fortnightly, and was
written at intervals over a whole year from month
to month. But the tragedy of Nicephorus was
written as a whole, and has a systematic plot and
catastrophe, in form modelled on Alfieri and Goethe
rather than Shakespeare, and without any attempt
at poetic phraseology. I intended Tree to play

^ Price of The Positivist Review.

* But what is contemporary fame compared to the verdict of
posterity ?—M. B.-E.

EPISTOLARY EXTRACTS 21

it, but he found it too big and costly, and, as
Henry Arthur Jones told me, Tree saw that the
woman's part would overpower him. Mrs. Pat
[presumably Patrick Campbell] has read it. Well,
here it is. — Yours always devotedly,

Frederic Harrison.

The play itself I give an account of farther
on, and I here give a few extracts from these
letters, not one without typical literary and, need-
less to say, personal interest, diversely written in
French, English, and Latin.

Bath, Juin 12, 191 3.

(Gerbert,^ 125).

Le volume est arrivd Admirable, mieux que
jamais.

Comparable a George Sand.

I am not sure whether this high compliment
was paid to my The Dream Charlotte or The
Romance of a French Parsonage, both published
some years before.

Bath, July 3, 191 3.

I have returned my little Introduction [to The
Lord of the Harvest^ marked for press without
alterations in word or in letter. I never correct

^ Positivists, like Romanists but more Catholic, date their letters
on saints' days. Gerbert, Pope Sylvester II., a learned physicist and
mathematician, was said to be in league with the Devil, 971, 1003.
The Positive saints are chosen from all religions, as befits the religion
of Humanity.

22 FREDERIC HARRISON

a proof except to note printers' blunders. Reading
it in print, I like it as well as anything I ever
wrote, and that because I enjoyed it. You in-
spired me, and I trust I caught some flavour of
your idyllic tone, and that I kept the "values
true," as painters say.

Everyone has his little vanities, and my vanity is
fine calligraphy, — see what a lucid and artistic hand
is this, — and my whim is never to alter a word in
a manuscript or even in a letter. I follow Pontius
Pilate, a fellow of good sense, who has never been
appreciated. Quod scripsi, scripsi, said he, and so
say I.

I enclose you my MS. to show you how I
write for the press — tout dun trait. I am sure
that fifty years hence the MS. of your Lord of
the Harvest will be secured for some library, and
I wish that but one page of my little Foreword
may be preserved, tacked to your copy. — Your aged
friend and more than ever true admirer,

F. H.

March 8, 19 14
(Thucydides, 126).

I rejoice to hear of your literary success. We
both urge you to get your Suffolk Courtship put
into "Everyman."^ ... I find that I can read no
new books — except yours. I spent my afternoons
[of a holiday sojourn with his wife near Bath] over

^ The admirable Dent series of reprints. But better fortune still
befell that simple story of Suffolk farming days and mid-Victorian
days. It now figures in the Oxford " World's Classics."

BATH 23

Sophocles, y^schylus, and now Xenophon on
Socrates. [Oh, Mr. Harrison, Positive and anti-
female Suffrage as you are, you might here have
alluded to the accomplished woman scholar Eliza-
beth, whose translation of that famous book has
long been a classic !] And I have just finished
Tristram Shandy — my copy is first edition, 4 vols.,
12 mo, 1765 — and Don Quixote in a translation.
I find the Spanish difficult, but I can read The
Positive Review of Mexico, which translates our
Calendar month by month. And I have Furt-
wangler's Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture — grand
Greek sculpture is my only hobby.

I entirely agree with you as to Bulwer [I
believe re my admiration of his Last Days of
Pompeii and Rienzi]. If you saw Bath forty years
ago, you may be assured that it is almost the only
city in England which has not been changed. It
has not grown and has no new buildings. There
is only one, the new hotel (a view of which I
enclose). (Shakespeare, " How many evils have
enclosed me round ! ") The charm of Bath is its
magnificent country round, its parks, gardens, and
endless walks, etc., its mild climate, daily music,
and agreeable society. We know all whom we
care to know, especially clerics, bishops, arch-
deacons, rectors, and the best houses within a
motor drive. I belong to the Philosophical In-
stitute and to the Literary Club, and my wife
works her Anti-Suffrage Committees. — With her
love and mine, ever your

Frederic Harrison.

24 FREDERIC HARRISON

With regard to this letter I wrote suggesting
that the Archdeacon and his new friend should
change pulpits on Sundays, so refreshing and such
a tonic to both congregations !

Bath, April 6, 19 14.

Many thanks for your letter and the kind words
of Professor Hales, whom I well remember years ago
as one of the F. D. Maurice men. I am sure that
your Lo7'd [of the Harvest] will have a long reign.

By way of rousing intellectual elements dormant
in Bath, I resolved to read my Nicephorus in the old
historic theatre here, before our friends and a lot of
Bath people. It has been adapted and translated
into German for an opera, and is now being trans-
lated as a play in full. And, in order to secure
copyright "acting rights," it has to be produced in
a public theatre. So I took the title-role myself,
and got the amateur dramatic society to read it in
parts on the stage before an invited house. They
all said they heard — especially Nicephorus; and
they seemed interested. One lady who is deaf, and
cannot hear a sermon in church, heard "every
word " in the theatre. [Quite naturally, for she was
not sent to sleep by curate's twaddle-dum-dee !] . . .
In any case, it was an event this pre77iiere of tout
Bath.

I took this up partly to relieve my feelings about
the awful public crisis. We are going straight to
the most horrible catastrophe in English history.
Ere this year is over, Britain will be in the throes
of dissolution. It is no use trying to make any

OF PLAYS AND THINGS 25

more compromises. I don't know which side is the
most culpable. But civil war is inevitable, and all
without any real principle to fight for — and certainly
nothing but generations of evil to follow on it.

I am obliged to you for telling me about our
Professor [the late Mr. Beesly]. I have [had] no
correspondence with him for some time. We are
likely to differ so deeply that I fear to write and
could not bear to open a discussion. I can hear his
snort of contempt if he ever heard of my playing in
a theatre. I am a Gallio, I know, but now a very
sad one.

Oddly enough, I should say, were not oddities
so-called of daily, hourly occurrence, an early letter
of Frederic Harrison has just come to hand. I had
taken up that striking Byzantine play, Nicephorus,
1906, to re-read, when out slipped a letter which
ran as follows — we had not yet called ourselves
by our baptismal names, nor had I as yet received
one of his epistles in Ciceronian Latin. These
endearing privileges were to come.

10 Royal Crescent, Bath,
April 14, 1914 (Archimedes, 126).

Dear Miss Betham- Edwards, — Many thanks
for your letter and views and all. If you really
wish to read my tragedy, let me present you with an
author's copy. I prefer it as a work of art to the
romance of Theophano [by himself. Macmillan].
That was not written as a whole with a general

26 FREDERIC HARRISON

plan at all. It was taken up to give miscellaneous
illustrations of the Byzantine world of the tenth
century, which I had been studying for years. It
came out in the twelve numbers of the Fortnightly.
... I am busy enough. I am continuing my
Last Thoughts, and have just finished my Com-
mentary on the Common Prayer [Book ?] and
Catholic Missal. My notes on our Calendar go
on in the Pos. Rev., and next week I am writing a
review of Bridges' Bacon. I have promised to
read a paper on R. Bacon at our Bath Literary
Club, and I shall give a course of history lectures
for the Bristol University branch at Bath. So I
have enough to do — after sweets, the sour !

Your words about Ireland show me how unfit
the ablest and best women are for politics. They
judge by their hearts, not their heads, and mistake
vague ideals for observed facts. [I fancy this
refers to the Casement incident.] Bloody war in
Ireland, and possibly in England, will not transfer
cottagers to Abergavenny Castle. It will only keep
Liberal policy out in the cold for a generation.
— Yours always devotedly,

Frederic Harrison.

Such a compliment I cannot omit, but blushingly
set down. Who so modest as the really great ?
To think of F. H. thanking M. B.-E. for a word of
praise !

April 1^, 1914.

"It is indeed a memorable compliment to me
that you should take the trouble to read my

PARIS 27

play, and with such minute attention and such
accurate memory. Your note about Princess
Theodora not being in the Dramatis Personae had
escaped me. I think she was thrown in at the
last moment to heighten the contrast between the
callousness of the wife and the grief of the sisters
of Romanus, and perhaps also to enable Tree to
put on the stage another pretty girl (and Byzan-
tine court robes. . . . Yes, there are too many
Johns). [In the dialogue.]

Beau Rivage Palace,
OucHY, Lausanne,
July 2, 1914.

Your letter reaches me here, but not the book.
We both left Bath on Monday, 22nd ult., with Olive
for the first tour we have taken together for twelve
years. My wife's health has been so much improved
at Bath that we felt moved to go to Paris, partly to
see Bernard's three pictures [their eldest son] well
placed in the Salon, to make acquaintance with his
many friends in Paris — artists, connoisseurs, and
patrons of his ; secondly, to our Positivist Society,
where I was asked to give them my personal
reminiscences of Auguste Comte, being now the
only survivor of those who saw him and talked to
him in 1855.

Our journey (broken at Dover) did my wife no
harm, and though she did not attempt to walk in
Paris, she was able to go to the Salon, the Studio,
the Luxembourg, and the meeting in the new rooms
of our Society. The reunion was most interesting
— about one hundred members, old and new. The

7

28 FREDERIC HARRISON

President said fine things of her and me, and I
spoke for thirty minutes, reading parts of my presi-
dential address to the Sociological Institute — the
English form of which will be in the Positive Review
for August. . . . The principal etcher in Paris has
etched in colour two of Bernard's Italian landscapes,
which G. Petit, the boss of painters (the G. Petit
Gallery is an annual exhibition), has purchased. So
our visit was a business affair for B. of much value.
And our visit to the new rooms of the Society was
greatly appreciated by them and enjoyed by us.
Bernard and I took Olive about to the various
galleries, shows, to the Bois de Boulogne, Bagatelle;
and B. took her to the theatre. We did not go out
but lived en pension. After a week in Paris, which
by Sunday got very hot, we came on the 30th to
this place. Our Bath doctor thought it would be
of use to my wife. . . . Ouchy is my old favourite
haunt, and I was really athirst to see the snow
mountains once more — of course, we shall not go
touring about here. At present the Lake is not too
hot, but 72° F. in my rooms — but we may go up to
some place on the hills, the doctor insists not above
4000 feet. At that, he thinks Switzerland will do
her good. She is wonderfully well in general health,
and everyone says she looks twenty years under
her age. Only she has to be very careful not to
stand or walk.

As for me, I am quite well, I think. I can walk
for two or three hours uphill, and sleep well ; but I
hardly eat anything but eggs, and fricassees, and
vegetable food. I have brought some classics and

CHAOS AND BATTLE 29

some poets, and have been since 6 a.m. in our
balcony reading Horace and Shelley at intervals,
and looking across the Lake at the Dent-du-Midi
and Savoy Alps, and dreaming of glacier excursions,
and of Byron and Gibbon and all the memories of
this centre of European traditions. The regicide
Ludlow, who lived and died at Vevey, inscribed on
his door :

Forti omne solum patria.

I inscribe :

Sapienti — solum Helveiicum — patria.

Our travellinor abroad tosrether for once all these
years — our tour to Switzerland, for our last look
at the Delectable Mountains — has been a bold
experiment, but it has succeeded, as yet. Outside,
in France, in Europe, in the Balkans, in Ireland, I
see nothing but chaos and battle. I cannot write a
word on it. — Yours always devotedly,

F. Harrison.

November iZ, I9I4-

I have been much pleased with your little
volume. That bit about the Marseillaise is really
most interesting and authentic, after Lamartine's
gush. And the account of Dor6 interests me much.
I had a Dore phase once myself. Do you know his
Rabelais? Did I not once before ask you this
question ? Do see Austin's new little book, The
Kaiser s War, with an Introduction of mine. The
Kaisertum is cracking up. But I fear our Radical
Pacifists will try to stop bringing the war to its

30 FREDERIC HARRISON

proper end. There will be a desperate effort to
call uti possidetis, "as you are," a drawn battle about
Easter. Germany is still in Russia, France,
Belgium. Her borders are untouched. — Yours
always, F. H.

March 21, 1917.

My very dear Friend, — I am indeed grateful
to you for giving me news of yourself, and I wish
you joy most heartily on the success of your new
book [ Twentieth Centmj France. Chapman & Hall].
It is a fine compliment from the great Frenchman.^
I must see it as soon as I am free of work. I am
now just finishing my memoirs of all I have lost in
Her [his beloved wife], and have made a collection
of her essays to make a volume, I trust, after the
war. In making a record of all her activities, I am
amazed at the great mass of various tasks she took
and completed in spite of her poor health and many
domestic cares. No one has any idea of what she
did. Our outreaching towards Humanity owed more
to her than to any of us men. Why am I left, the
useless one ? — and she who could have done so much
more is gone. Your beautiful "In Memoriam "
[ Westminster Gazette'] I purpose to put as the motto
of the volume, and her hymn, No. 58,^ as the
L'envoi. . . .

I am re-issuing my " Thoughts on Govern-
ment," 1874, in the current Positive Review. I
foresaw forty years ago the House of Commons

^ The award of the title " Ofticier de I'lnstruction Pubhque de
France."

^ See at end.

LORD HOSEBERY 31

pretending to govern. And the French Chamber
is as bad as ours . . .

i^Re Scott's novels.) I have always thought The
Black Dwarf one of the very worst. When I
was at Ruskin's in 1899 he gave me to read in
Scott's own MS. that he bought, a folio or quarto
written about 2500 words every morning. That
beats you.

I read no new book at all — I am now reading
only tragedy : Sophocles' Antigone, the greatest of
all tragedies ; Corneille's Horace, Racine's Athalie,
etc. etc. ... I have been occupied every after-
noon this month by Lord Rosebery, who comes to
take me out in his car, or to take a walk with him
in the parks and country. He is a brilliant talker. —
Affectionately yours always, F. H.

On November 6 of 191 7 comes the following
in Ciceronian Latin :

Fredericus Matildae suae S.D.

Gratissimo sane animo recepi litteras tuas
amabiles, anno aetatis meae sexto et octogesimo
jam peracto. Socii enim sumus et aequales in
senectute, in litteris, in cogitationibus tam de
rebus publicis quam de rebus divinis. Nihil prorsus
habemus, O sodalium meorum superstes unica, quod
senectutem accusemus. Anni quippe octogessimi
corporibus nostris nihil intolerabile afferunt, dum
mentibus nostris — gratias agamus Sanctae Humani-
tati — pauca certe detrahunt. Hoc si incredibile
videatur junioribus, qui nugis trivialibus vacare

32 FREDERIC HARRISON

Solent, monendum est nos — praesertim te arnica
mea venerabilis — e juventute prima animum totum
dedisse in litteras vere humaniores, tarn Graecas
quam Latinas, tarn in versu quam in sermone
pedestri scriptas. Quid dicam — non solum in
litteras Anglicas sed in quidquid Franci et externae
gentes optimum et celeberrimum tradiderunt.

Mirabile est quomodo studia nostra in idem
consentire videantur. Libros illos quos hodie te
legere mihi scribis, ego autem praecipue in manu
habere soleo. Nihil pusillum, nihil vulgare, nihil
obscenum aut -obsoletum in bibliothecam meam
intrat. Die noctuque verso praeclaras illas veterum
tragedias et comedias — praesertim Aeschyli Septem.
Quippe rpiXoylau 'ArpeiSMv censeo ingenii humani
maximum partum fuisse, Swinburnius noster recte
aestimavit. Si quis velit Sophoclem — Graecorum
omnium dulcissimum — senem ilium qui ad nonagesi-
mum annum novas tragedias fecit — Aeschylo proxime
accessisse, certe hoc erat in 'AvTty6vr)<; suae TpayiKcordTrj
ilia oratione Virginis moriturae :

u) Tv/i/8o9, w vv/j,(})etoVf w KaTa(rKa(f)r]^
ocKrjai'i aei^povpo<i, ol iropevofiac

Homeri, Aeschyli, Sophoclis et Aristophanis opera
omnia recenter perlegi — Euripides non aeque mihi
arridet, forsitan e memoria lugubre scholarium die-
rum. Inter Latinos, Vergilius, Horatius, Catullus,
Juvenalis, Plinius maxime me delectant. Lucretium,
Tacitum, Persium studere laboriose potius quam
legere vacue fas est.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 33

Hie legendi meus est mos. Mane, adhuc in
lecto requiescens, cantica ilia recito quae conjux mea
in aeternum deploranda tanto studio et ingenio con-
fecit. Haec sunt preces matutinae. Turn, quum
epistolas receptas, actorum diurnas scripturas ephe-
meridas illas perfecerim, converto me ad Ajacem
Sophocleum cum commentariis optimis Ricardi Jebb,
aut " Poetae " nostri W.S. aliquid, vel Idyllium quod
Tennysonius noster e carminibus vetustis Med :
Aevi elaboravit. Tandem in cubiculum scandens
Scotti nostri incomparabilis historiam nonnullam
mecum porto.

Morem legendi tuum, precor, mihi quoque
describere velis.

Scribebam Bathonia die Vico. Nov. a.d. 19 17.

If you want details and dates, turn to my Auto-
biographic Mevtoirs (Macmillan, 8vo, 2 vols., 191 1).
It is the most veracious, shameless, naked, unveil-
ing, disembowelling exposure of a man's inside ever
seen in literature.^ I n its 800 pages it tells almost
everything I could remember and find recorded in
letters, diaries, or books, even common trifles from
October 18, 1831, down to October 18, 191 1, when
it was first published, csiat. 80. But even if you
read that through with all the huge bibliography, pp.
335-345, you would not know half what I have done,
seen, and written. Without that remarkable classic
(as in the twenty-first century it will be) you would
not know one per cent of my doings and writings.

^ No. What else is the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini and
of Rousseau ?

34 FREDERIC HARRISON

People here in Bath have no idea of what I am or
have done or written. It is not a double life I lead,
a Hyde and JekylP affair — it is a centuple life I
lead. I have been, seen, done, written fifty things
they never heard of [dear harmless old ladies and
gentlemen, how should they ?]. There is almost
nothing that I have not tried ^ — even stag-hunt, fox-
hunt, hare-hunt. I have ridden a race-horse on a
race-course, and have been at all the great races, at
times driven in my dog-cart, and in a four-horse
drag [carriage or coach, Thackeray], etc. etc. I
have often been on the top of every great mountain
in Scotland, Wales, Cumberland, Alps, Pyrenees,
Apennines, Austria, and Greece. I have yachted
in the Channel and in the Mediterranean. I have
been in every capital and great city in Europe bar-
ring Madrid and Seville, and also in the U.S.A. I
have worked in every museum in Europe barring
Madrid, and have talked with nearly every famous
politician and writer in Britain, France, Italy,
U.S.A., Holland, Greece, Turkey, Scandinavia. I
have been down coal-mines, I am an enrolled
member of two great Trades Unions. I have been
the guest and the host of many Labour leaders,
including a visit to a prisoner in the Conciergerie [no
explanation], and I witnessed the decapitation of an
Italian officer in a riot. I was present at the Italian
vote in the Duchies for Victor Emmanuel and at the

^ The famous story by R. L. Stevenson.

^ Except perhaps, like Lord Brassey, learning a new language, in
his case that jaw-breaking German at the age of seventy. What an
exploit ! His father's, the great railway contractor, nothing to it.

A CENTUPLE LIFE 35

election of Tricoupis in Athens. I have shaken
hands with Gambetta, Mazzini, Victor Hugo, Gari-
baldi, and sat in the gallery of the House of Commons
beside the Comte de Paris. I have heard every
great actor since Macready and every actress since
Rachel and Grisi. I have tried everything — have
been an alderman, a J. P., an LL.D., D.C.L., Litt.D.,
a horseman from boyhood, a swimmer, a mountaineer,
a waltzer, a card-player, a diner-out, member of a
dozen clubs, a man about town, a Park revolutionary
orator. Only two things I have always barred : ( i )
Tobacco in any form and drink. (2) Sport, mean-
ing killing of animals. But I have been on the Alps
with hunters and have walked over most moors in
Scotland and Britain — indeed, have owned game
preserves. . . . Well, I can't go on, I only want
to assure you that you will never get to the end of
me. . . .

I am really going to stop writing for the public
now. I am going to rest and read old books. I
have always had of late at my bedside Plato, and
mystical stuff it is, and Malory's Mort d Arthur,
far finer than Tennyson's "fashion-plate" Idylls.
Now I am going to read through Plutarclis Lives.

Glorious news ! Early victory. — Your devoted
friend, Frederic.

From a later note about the same time :

I rejoice to hear that you are so cheerful and so
busy. We have just got home', to Bath, having had
three weeks at Lyme Regis, far the most interesting

36 FREDERIC HARRISON

and pleasant of all Channel ports, a real old harbour
of Plantagenets and Tudors — sent out ships to the
Armada, keeps her old stone breakwater. Read
Persuasion. I am wonderfully well. . . .

Then follows a sentence on the quite imaginary
indifference of the reading world to his own works.
He styles himself effete, passd, oublie, mort, as many
others of his mental height in moments of depres-
sion have done before.

"Will anyone read my novels when I am gone,
doctor ? " asked the great Dumas of his doctor when
on his dying bed. ** We always give one to patients
about to undergo an operation," was the retort.
" Straightway their own case is clean forgotten,
and the ordeal is cheerfully met."

Ill

GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME
BODICHON

I

It was in the spring of 1867 that I first met the
great woman noveHst now known throughout the
entire reading world. Our acquaintance began in
this way. I had spent the winter in Algiers under
the roof of that remarkable pair, Dr. Eugene and
Madame Barbara Leigh-Smith Bodichon. The
doctor had won his titles of fame by valuable works
on the colony, also by equally valuable medical
services during visitations of malaria, and last, but
not least, when Deputy of the Chamber, by his
motion to abolish slavery throughout the French
African colony, a measure which was straightway
carried into effect. Daughter of a landed proprietor,
Benjamin Smith, M.P. for Norwich, his English
wife before her marriage in 1857 had done much for
education and the improvement of the legal status of
her sex. A charming water-colour artist, she never
attained the position her gifts merited, too many

38 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

objects occupying her ever-active mind. With her
husband she did much to improve hygienic con-
ditions of the Algerian plain by vast plantations of
the health-giving American Eucalyphts globulus.
A rich woman, her wealth was always spent upon
great objects, and as the foundress of the first
University for women (Girton College) in the
United Kingdom, she has won for herself an im-
perishable niche in history. Women are very
disloyal to each other, and her biography yet remains
to be written. No Girtonian has troubled herself
about her benefactress.

This noble woman was my intimate friend, and
at the date I mention we had returned together from
a tour in Spain and a winter in Algiers, myself, for
the nonce, being again her guest at 5 Blandford
Square.

On the morning after our arrival she said :

"Now, Milly" (that was what the French call
\.\\Q petit nom always used by my family and familiars),
"put on your bonnet and go with me to the Priory.
I will ask Marian if I may present you."

My heart leaped at the proposal, for I knew
that Marian was the baptismal Mary Ann thus
euphemised by George Eliot's closest friend.

The Priory, that celebrated " gathering-place of
souls," to quote our equally great Victorian poetess,
was one of the many St. John's Wood villas almost
to be called country retreats. The comfortably pro-

" POLLY " 39

portioned two-storied residence, approached by a
drive, stood sufficiently apart from the road as to
ensure its inmates comparative quiet. Here Mr.
and Mrs. Lewes lived historic years ; and although
uncemented by legal ties, never was union more
complete or more fruitful in blessing to both : wit
and perennially youthful spirits on his part lightened
the weight of thought on hers, and kept alive the
all-saving grace of humour.

Even her best friend could not introduce anyone
without permission. So I waited inside the gate
till my hostess beckoned me, and there I was in
the presence of a tall, prematurely old lady wearing
black, with a majestic but appealing and wholly
unforgettable face. A subdued yet penetrating
light — I am tempted to say luminosity — shone from
large dark eyes that looked all the darker on
account of the white, marble-like complexion. She
might have sat for a Santa Teresa.

Unaffectedly cordial was my reception, but
hardly had I recovered from one thrill when I was
bouleversde, as the French say, by the glamour of
another. The conversation naturally turned upon
Spain, when suddenly Mr. Lewes accosted the
great woman with boyishly enthusiastic camerade-
ship.

" Now, Polly, what say you to this ? "

Bishop Proudie in Trollope's immortal scene
could not have been more thunder-struck at hearing

40 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

" the wife of his bosom called a woman " than I
was then.

What the "this" referred to I forget, but very
possibly to an idea afterwards carried out. In the
following year Mr. and Mrs. Lewes followed our
footsteps south, their journey resulting in The
Spanish Gypsy, a poem, despite the invention of
its heroine's exquisite name and many fine lines,
now all but forgotten. As an hour later we passed
out of the gate, my friend began :

"Shall I tell you Marian's compliment to
yourself? 'I congratulate you, dear Barbara,'
she said, ' on possessing a friend who is without
fringes.' "

It is the only time that I have ever heard the
word "fringes" used for " fads,"^ and the only time
I ever received a commendatory one from the same
lips. How much more gratified should I have
been had she expressed her pleasure at meeting
the authoress of such and such a novel ! But I can
understand her reticence. What, indeed, would life
have been worth had she once begun to receive
the confidences and aspirations of youthful tyros }
Her lot would have been worse than Miss
Mitford's.

My hostess's invitation to dinner for the next
day was accepted, and circumstances grave and gay

^ But George Eliot knew better. Did not Bishop Taylor write of
" the fringes of repentance " ?

A SUFER-PAIR 41

made the occasion equally ineffaceable. Quite sure
of the great visitors' punctuality, we awaited them
in the drawing-room. True enough, the street
bell rano- on the stroke of seven. What was
Madame Bodichon's dismay when her incompar-
able parlour-maid threw wide the door with the
announcement :

" Captain and Mrs. Harrison."

Then came a ripple of laughter — George Henry
Lewes' hearty and unfeigned, George Eliot's
slightly remonstrant. The name was a joke. It
was beyond her competence to play the child. In
excellent spirits the simple but well-cooked dinner
was partaken of, Madame Bodichon involuntarily
ever acting upon a precept of Mahomet in the
Koran — " Bestow not upon the rich." The more
opulent her guests, the plainer was their fare.

But conviviality had no meaning for these two.
The dinner-table topic resolved itself into this prob-
lem : How and by what means would the world —
that is to say, the terrestrial globe we inhabit — come
to an end ? By combustion, submergence, gradual
decay, and so on. I seem to hear George Eliot's
penetrating, pathetic voice :

"Yet, dear Barbara, might not this come
about " Or, " Suppose that "

For myself, I was silent, overawed as some
alumnus when Pericles and Aspasia held their
court.

42 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

II

Thenceforward I was invited to the famous
Sunday afternoons at the Priory, and I well remember
George Eliot's kindly attempt to set me at ease.

The entry into such a circle was no trifling
ordeal to a young country-bred, although already
much-travelled, girl, and already having several
novels to her credit, the first of these now celebrat-
ing its diamond jubilee/

There in the centre of the room, as if enthroned,
sat the Diva ; at her feet in a semicircle gathered
philosophers, scientists, men of letters, poets, artists
— in fine, the leading spirits of the great Victorian
age. Frederic Harrison, almost the only one left
us of so memorable a group ; Professor Beesly,
Herbert Spencer, Browning, William Morris, that
charming poet and self-styled " singer of an empty
day " ; Sir Frederick Leighton, Director of the
National Gallery ; Philip Gilbert Hamerton, author
of French and English and cementer of Anglo-
French friendship at a time when we seemed
perilously, if not hopelessly, Germanised, to our
certain moral, intellectual, and national abasement
— these were only a few of the noteworthy figures
caught sight of as, timidly enough, I advanced to
the hostess.

^ The White House by the Sea, 1857 ; in 1918 existing in Collins'
Clear Print Series issued at 64.

LEIGHTON 43

Despite her grand aloofness from convention-
alities and an utter incapacity to overdo courtesy, — I
will not use the word to flatter, — George Eliot, never,
that I ever heard of, hurt people's feelings or pooh-
poohed valueless admiration. She could not have
rebuked a naive worshipper with a Johnsonian,
" Before you choke me with your praises. Madam,
remember what your praises are worth." Not that
I should have ventured upon so much as an allusion
to the masterpieces so dear and familiar, Adam Bede
and the rest. And seeing that she had nothing to
fear from me on that score, as soon as a break in
the discussion permitted, she withdrew from the
group and chatted with me in the easiest, least
bookish fashion possible.

Madame Bodichon had naturally told her of my
farming days, and that, having now lost my father
and mother, I was entering upon a literary life in
London. Be this as it may, she immediately began
to talk of her own early life and of her father. Very
tender was her voice as she touched on the sacred
theme, and so full of tenderness were her large dark
eyes that I quite understood Sir Frederick Leighton's
enthusiasm. For, our brief chat over, I fell back,
and taking the first vacant chair, it happened to be
next his. We were old acquaintances, had walked
and talked in Kensington Gardens, had set out in a
bus for a Saturday Pop together, — as the celebrated
week-end concerts at St. James's Hall were called, —

44 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

and a most pleasant friend and neighbour he
became.

On this Sunday afternoon he seemed obHvious of
everything around him, his eyes fixed on the priestess-
Hke, rather Syl)il-Hke figure opposite. After a me-
chanically uttered phrase or two he burst out — alover's
voice could hardly have been more impassioned :

" How beautiful she is ! "

After all, was not the artist right ? What is
physical perfection compared to spiritual beauty,
the inner radiance that transforms, etherialises
features not flawless according to rule of thumb ?
Meanwhile Mr. Lewes was doing everything to
promote the general pleasure — acting, indeed, a dual
part, relieving the hostess of all responsibility. Who
could help comparing the pair to Titania and Puck ?
— herself, queen-like, effortless, impassible ; he, an-
ticipating her behests, here, there, and everywhere,
taking care that no guest should be neglected.
Naturally, the German element was never absent
from these assemblages. Was not the biographer
of Goethe styled der Goetische Lewes by his country-
people, and had not homage been paid to both in the
so ironically called Fatherland.-* He now brought up
a quiet, gentlemanly-looking man, saying in German :

" I have the pleasure of introducing to you
Herr Liebreich, the discoverer of chloral."^

1 Chloral was discovered by Liebig in 183 1. It was first used as
an anaesthetic and hypnotic by Liebreich in 1869.

THE WHOLE DUTY OF MAN 45

I had already spent many months at Stuttgart,
as many at Frankfort-on-the-Main, and had wintered
in Vienna, so the question of language was not dis-
quieting. But a tete-a-tHe with a scientist did seem
rather dreadful. My interlocutor, however, tried
to talk down to me, and I tried to talk up to him,
and soon the welcome clatter of cups and saucers
relieved the tension. There was a move towards
the lower end of the room, Mr. Lewes presiding at
the teapot.

"To make tea, my friends," he said laughingly,
" I hold is the whole duty of man."

All now was comparative frivolity, gaiety, and
persiflage ; mirth and music replaced Socratic dis-
cussion and talk worthy of being Boswellised.

" We have a singing bird here," said Mr.
Lewes. " She must charm us before departure."

The fashionably dressed young lady in question,
some Lady Clara Vere de Vere, did not deny the
delicate imputation, and true enough, before the
party broke up, those almost solemn precincts were
ringing with just such a song as might divert the
guests of any Belgravian drawing-room.

Belgravia, indeed, had forced an entrance into
the Priory, and, as we might expect, that intrusion
was followed by an exodus. More than one old
friend and habitu6, more than one distinguished
guest dropped off. The " gathering-place of souls "
gradually changed its character. Its doors had

46 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

been thrown too wide, and "fools rushed in where
angels feared to tread." ^

III

But I was soon to see George Eliot in intellectual
and social undress, to enjoy her company for an
entire week, perhaps the only person now living
retaining such a memory.

Madame Bodichon had rented a Hi^h Church
vicarage in the Isle of Wight for the winter of
1870-71, myself being her guest throughout the
period, and before Christmas she invited her great
friends to join us.

"Yes, dear Barbara," came a reply in the
exquisitely neat handwriting of one who could do
nothing flimsily — " Yes, dear Barbara, we will come
and weep with you over the sorrows of France."

They duly arrived, and a memorable week it
was to the youngest of the quartet, doubtless her
fellow-guests little suspecting that there was " a chiel
among ye takin' notes."

From the first Madame Bodichon monopolised
Titania. Puck had to put up with me, and from the
first he gave us all a taste of his quality. As we

^ In his two bulky volumes Herbert Spencer gives many interesting
notes on George Eliot. See his Autobiography (Williams & Nor-
gate. London, 1904). Unfortunately, the great philosopher who had
mastered the knowable had not mastered Pope's maxim: "The
greatest art of all, the art to blot."

THE HUMOUR OF LEWES 47

sat down to breakfast next morning, the sedate,
middle-aged parlour-maid was greeted by "A merry
Christmas to you, Ann, and a marrying New
Year." Too well-trained to giggle, and perhaps not
displeased with the suggestion, Ann blushed like a
sixteen-year-old and just managed to stammer out
her thanks.

With dinner-time came another display of ir-
repressible frolicsomeness. Soup being removed,
Mr. Lewes rubbed his hands with a well-affected
Epicurean air.

" You will, I know, dear Barbara," he said,
"excuse the liberty taken by an old friend. I have
ventured to add a little delicacy to your bill of
fare."

Well tutored, Ann now removed the silver cover
with a flourish, and as she did so the uninitiated three
sprang back with a cry. Lo and behold! Instead
of a rare dainty, an uncanny thing like a crayfish
uncurled as if alive ! It was the scouro^e with
which the rector flagellated himself, and which the
temporary occupant of his sanctum had laid hands
upon for our diversion.

A week of glorious walks and talks followed.
Fortunately, the weather was fine, and every day,
most often between lunch and tea, we paired off for
long strolls, in what Swift would have described as
a "walkable" country. Sometimes we made little
excursions, and of one I retain a pathetic re-

48 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

membrance. At a village station I met a pleasant
novelist, to-day, I fear, quite forgotten — by name,
Georgiana M. Craik. Now I had been cautioned
by no means to disclose the name of Madame
Bodichon's visitors to chance-met acquaintances.
But my conscience did afterwards reproach me
for not having whispered in this one's ear, as
the others sauntered up and down, "That lady
in black is no other than the author of Adam
Beder

Could persuasion, however, could anything have
prevented the other from metaphorically falling
on her knees before the Diva ? I should very
likely have brought about mortification and got
myself into a terrible scrape. George Eliot was in
her zenith, the gentle little author of Riverston
and other tales had hardly popped her head above
the horizon.

During our walks Madame Bodichon would
carry George Eliot in one direction, Mr. Lewes and
myself taking another. He generally talked the
whole time of "Polly." It delighted him to
discover in me a whole-hearted admirer of Felix
Holt, a work generally less admired than their great
brethren. How he laughed when I quoted that
denunciation of his sex by Mrs. Transom's maid :
"creatures who stand straddling and gossiping in
the rain."

But the crowning hour of the day came when

GEORGE ELIOT AT THE PIANO 49

dinner was over, lamps were shaded, and we
gathered round the fire. No recreations were in
request ; whist, chess, backgammon, billiards, would
here have been the extreme of boredom. Higrh
talk mingled with lighter topics have left golden
memories.

And may I be excused for mentioning a proud
remembrance ? On two occasions the shy country
girl was listened to by the great. Once all three
heard me with profound interest, and once I gave
them the merriest moment of that especial
symposium.

It happened that a Socialist friend, Mr. Co well-
Stepney by name, had lately escorted me to a sitting
of the International, presided over by Dr. Karl
Marx, the founder of International Socialism, who
more than any other man has influenced the Labour
movement throughout the civilised world. Now
this sort of experience was quite out of Mr. and
Mrs. Lewes's way. Their world was the world of
the intellectual dite, not of "the man in the street,"
the hewers of wood and drawers of water. So
to the least little particular I could give, all paid
the utmost attention.

I must not forget that during these evenings we
sometimes enjoyed a musical treat. George Eliot
would sit down to the piano and very correctly,
perhaps somewhat too painstakingly, give us a
sonata of Beethoven from notes. The charm of the

50 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

performance was that it was done amiably and
evidently in order to give us pleasure.

''What shall it be, dear little boy?" she would
ask, as she turned over the contents of the music-
wagon, and the "dear little boy" — I love to hear
these terms of endearment among the great —
generally demanded Beethoven. One sonata she
played to us was Op. 14, No. 2, containing the slow,
plaintive Andante in A minor, ever one of my
favourites.

For light holiday reading the wonderful pair had
brought surely the strangest book in the world —
namely, Wolf's Prolegomena, which, however, had
one advantage. It did not touch upon the tragedy
of the time. In this work the most gifted scholar
and first critic of his age (1729-1824) unfolded
with equal erudition and acuteness his bold
theory that the Odyssey and Iliad are com-
posed of numerous ballads by different minstrels,
strung together in a kind of unity by subsequent
editors.

As I have mentioned, our rectory adjoined the
church, and on Christmas morning, and in arctic
weather, Madame Bodichon carried her friend off
to hear the fine musical service — Mass would be
the proper appellation.

George Eliot listened with subdued rapture, the
clear shrill voices of the choir, the swell of the
organ evidently evoking a religious mood none

HIGH TALK 51

the less fervent because unallied with formulary
and outward observance.

The midnight service had been proposed,
but

'* No, dear ; on no account would I keep George
up for me so late," said the great visitor, unlike her
hostess in one respect, indeed in many. Whilst
Madame Bodichon could never have half enough
of anything she loved, whether good company,
aesthetic impression, or strawberries and cream —
her abnormal energy craving more and yet more
expansion — George Eliot's nature needed repose.
She did not, in French phrase, chercher des Amotions.

But why, oh ! why did I neglect the seven days'
wonderful opportunity ? With the unwisdom and
self-assurance of youth, I neglected notebook and
tablets. It never occurred to me to set down the
high talk of that Ventnor drawing-room. Instead
of binding them into a sheaf, I let the golden ears
fall to the ground.

Here are one or two, the topic being literary
excellence and fame — perhaps I should rather say,
recognition and the criterion of both.

"There is the money test," George Eliot said,
and paused, as she often did before continuing a
train of thought. [Would she have uttered that
sentence nowadays, when novels reaching fabulous
prices are clean forgotten before copies have become
soiled in Mudie's ?]

52 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

Her next sentence even less commends itself
to all lovers of literature :

"Then there is the test of sincerity."

A canon not unassailable either. For of course
the only, the final, test of literature, whether grave
or gay, is duration, the ineffaceable seal of Time.
Was ever any book written with greater sincerity,
for instance, than the Proverbial Philosophy of
Martin F. Tupper ? — a book that enriched the
author and was for a time taken seriously. Who
reads poor dear Martin Tupper's twaddle-dum-dee
nowadays }

If George Eliot, naturally enough, held aloof
from literary aspirants, Mr. Lewes never lost an
occasion of helping them. When the great week
came to an end he said to me :

" Now you will, I am sure, like your new novel
to appear in the Tauchnitz edition. I will write
to the Baron, and as you say you are going to
Germany in the spring, I will ask him to call upon
you. On arriving at Leipzig, you have only to send
him your card."

The German visit was carried out, and to Mr.
Lewes I owed not only the satisfaction and profit
of having all my books thenceforward published
in the famous Continental series, but the warm
friendship and hospitalities of the first Baron and
the second, his son.

SERIOUS C0NVF:RSE 53

IV

Yet a few words more about one of the greatest
figures in our national Valhalla, and one whose
fame, if she ever troubled herself about fame, has
surpassed any author's wildest dreams. I am sorry
that she died half a century before she had an en-
thusiastic following in Japan. I can fancy Mr.
Lewes's exuberance over the triumph, his " Well,
Polly, after that I shall never venture an opinion
of your books, that is quite certain." Or, " Now,
Polly, see if a Chinese translation of Adam Bede
won't be the next pleasant surprise." It was
really beautiful, this absolute comprehension of a
larger intellect and character by a lesser and less
stable.

A more agreeable walking companion could
not be, but I sometimes wished that we had not
invariably paired off. There were, however, ex-
cellent reasons for this arranf^ement. Althouoh not
admitted to the confidential tete-a-tete of our hostess
and her visitor, I well knew what grave subjects
would be discussed by them.

The foundress of Girton College and the in-
defatigable pioneer of legal reforms regarding
women had one subject even nearer her heart than
even the educational, material, and social elevation
of her sex. Madame Bodichon entertained a
passionate pity for her pariah sister, a horror of

54 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

conditions accepted, not to say in a civilised but
also in a Christian country. Had she lived longer,
she would have joyfully welcomed a growing re-
pulsion in France and a spirit of revolt against the
system which, in plain words and excused on
behalf of the public health, legalises and supervises
prostitution.

If righteous indignation characterised the doer,
the woman of action, I should call sensitiveness the
other's leading quality. I firmly believe that had
George Eliot convicted herself of inflicting a grave
injury on any living soul, remorse would have worn
her out, killed her by inches. Her super-sensitive-
ness in little things was painful to witness. Here
is an instance.

During the week I was obliged to call in a
surgeon, and have a finger lanced on account of
a painful gathering. Next morning, in shaking
hands by the breakfast table, she pressed, or rather
fancied she pressed, the injured part.

" Oh ! " she said, with a look of positive anguish,
" I have hurt the poor finger. I am always doing
this sort of thing."

And it was with difficulty that I could reassure
her.

An instance of such sensitiveness was told me
by Mrs. Hamerton, who in her husband's lifetime
had occasionally attended the Sunday afternoon
receptions. On her reappearance after a year or

A SOVEREIGN NATURE 55

two's absence, George Eliot asked news of her
family and friends.

" No gaps ? " she said, with quite affectionate
solicitude.

Again, when the widow of Arthur Hugh Clough,
the poet of the Bothie of Tober-na- Vuolich and the
subject of Matthew Arnold's fine elegy Tkyrsis,
called one Sunday with his little son, the hostess's
first question was a pathetic, " What is his name ? "
She always liked to call children by their names,
she added.

There is a suavity in sovereign natures. These
alone can discern the infinitely fine shades dividing
simplicity from annoyance, real from affected ad-
miration. As a subtle writer of the last century has
admirably written : " It is a rare perfection of the
intellectual and moral faculties which allows all
objects, great and small, to be distinctly perceived,
and perceived in their relative magnitudes."
George Eliot was " a soul of the high finish " of
which Isaac Taylor wrote. Here is an instance.

After that Christmas week I returned to 5 Bland-
ford Square, and had a very severe bronchial attack.
So serious was my condition that on partial recovery
I was summarily ordered a Mediterranean cruise,
and with a friend sailed from Portsmouth to
Gibraltar, thence to Malta and Alexandria, thence
to Athens, and from Athens to Venice.

On my return in March I ran up from Hastings,

56 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

my abode from that period to this, to London. On
the way to Madame Bodichon's I called at the
Priory, leaving with my card a bunch of violets,
one of the cream cheeses formerly a Hastings
speciality, also some pats of butter, golden of
the golden, creamiest of the cream. The un-
sophisticated, perhaps to ordinary folks impertinent,
attention was charmingly acknowledged on the
following Sunday afternoon. Taking both my
hands when I entered with my hostess, George
Eliot said, with congratulations on my recovered
health and a smile :

" So, having recovered yourself, you are bent
upon fattening your friends ? "

Little traits of quite other kind will, I am sure,
be v/elcome.

The two great friends would sometimes stroll
along the streets together and look at the shops
like other womenkind.

One morning as they sauntered down Bond
Street, pausing before each glittering display,
George Eliot said : "How happy are we both, dear
Barbara, that we want nothing we see here ! "

One point struck me. The Priory knew no pets.
So intellectually and humanly full were the lives of
both master and mistress that there was no room
for cat, dog, bird, or goldfish. Children, as has
been mentioned, were occasionally admitted into the
learned precincts, but no live playthings. Did ever

GRACE AND AMELIA 57

a dog wag its tail and therein ask a caress from
hosts or guests ? I know not.

Nor except at the door was anything seen or
heard of Grace and Amelia, the two faithful middle-
aged maids, who, as far as I ever learned, knew
nothing of their great lady's writings except that
they had made her famous. To the perpetual dis-
appointment of the worthy couple. Queen Victoria
never drew up to the door, no royal visit filled their
cup to overflowing. Grace and Amelia little
dreamed that their own names would live in the
book of fame ! Such is the irony of life.

V

To criticise the world's classics is to find fault
with the Pyramids for not being round, with
Shakespeare for not having been a novel-writer,
with Victor Hugo for not having laid the scene of
Notre-Dame between 1789-94, and made Madame
Roland his hero instead of Esmeralda, and so on
and so on. How futile, indeed, is all criticism of
the Immortals ; how puerile are quibbling and
cavilling at leading spirits, "whose names are
written on the book of Time."

One or two noteworthy estimates only of George
Eliot, her life-work and character, I give here. A
great Victorian, one of the greatest, who knew her
well, and who is happily yet among us, has said,

58 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHOiN

"George Eliot was greater than her works." But
must not this be affirmed of creators in any field ?
Is not the master ever greater than his masterpiece ?
Do we adore a chef-doeuvi-e in the same frame of
mind as we adore a beautiful landscape or sunset ?
The individual gift, the aspiration and achievement,
cannot be ignored by the least reflective.

Again, it is often urged that fame, adulation,
and intercourse with the most brilliant wits, geniuses,
and most renowned thinkers of her time were in her
case a loss rather than a gain. The idyllic charm,
the raciness and spontaneity of Scenes of Clerical
Life, Adam Bede, and perhaps of The Mill on the
Floss, gradually gave way to a more laboured style
and a more introspective psychology. Romola — a
midway production — is an historical novel worthy of
comparison with Bulwer Lytton's ever-delightful
Last Days of Pompeii, but Daniel Deronda, 1876,
if not a dead-weight on her reputation, as was Count
Robert of Paris on the great Sir Walter's, showed,
as a judicial critic wrote,^ " a marked falling-off in
power, though many of the scenes are sufficiently
rich in pathos, humour, and insight."

In confirmation of my remark, another friend to
whom, as to Barbara Bodichon, she was " Marian "
always, herself a wife and mother, and by no means a
commonplace writer — Madame Parkes-Belloc, wrote :

" The truth is, dear Milly, after her early years,

1 Chambers^ s Encyclopcedia, 1889, by Richard Holt Hutlon.

DIFFIDENT AND SENSITIVE 59

and especially after her installation as mistress of
the Priory, she saw very little of life — that is, of
family life."

How could it have been otherwise ? What
room was there in that Parnassian retreat for noisy
bantlings ? But George Eliot had known child-
hood in earlier years. She was not obliged, like
Herbert Spencer, to borrow a friend's child or two
in order to study the workings and development of
the human mind.

Although there were neither pets, human nor
four-footed, nor games at the Priory, it was by no
means a case of all work and no play. The founder
of synthetic philosophy must be referred to on this
head. The two ponderous volumes Herbert Spencer
has devoted to his own life abound in references to
his friend, hostess, and lawn-tennis partner !

It is not surprising to find that one of George
Eliot's characteristics was diffidence of her own
powers, and the philosopher found it no easy matter
in early days to persuade her that she possessed all
the gifts of a novel-writer. So sensitive was she
regarding her own gifts, even after recognition, that
Mr. Lewes used to put into a special drawer such
reviews as were encouraging only. Onslaughts and
animadversions were rigidly excluded. And did
not Mr. Lewes once write to Spencer, " Marian is
in the next room crying over the distresses of her
young people."
9

6o GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

Here is a witticism at the expense of a certain

Dr. A who was remarkable for his tendency

to dissent from whatever opinion another uttered.
After a conversation in which he had repeatedly
displayed this tendency, she said to him :

*' Dr. A- , how is it that you always take your

colour from your company?" "/ take my colour
from my company ? " he exclaimed. '* What do you
mean?" "Yes," she replied, "the opposite colour."

Here is another delightful story, but not referring
to the great novelist. Spencer used to attend the
first Wagner concerts at the Albert Hall with
friends. One day he relates : " As we came down-
stairs the lady of the party was accosted by an
acquaintance with the question, ' Well, how did
you like it ? ' to which her reply was, * Oh, I bore
it pretty well,' a reply which went far to express
my own feelings."

How seriously, one might almost say how
sacred, George Eliot regarded her calling the
following story will show.

Her great friend Barbara, handsome, rich,
spirited, generous, was one of those fortunate
individuals who could never for an instant imaorine
herself an intruder, never conceive it possible that
she should be in anybody's way, least of all in the
way of those who loved her. One morning, with
happy unconcern, she rang the Priory bell half an
hour before lunch, and was admitted and announced.

CRICHTON IN PETTICOATS 6i

Tender-heartedness itself, the novelist rushed out
of her study, pale, trembling, agitated, her remon-
strant " Oh, Barbara ! " even more poignant than
could have been Sir Isaac Newton's "Oh,
Diamond, Diamond, thou little knowest the mischief
thou hast done ! " And quite certainly Diamond
did not droop his ears, wag his tail, and with his
eyes plead for forgiveness so pathetically as, ready
to cry, poor Madame Bodichon murmured excuses
then.

Ever on the alert where Polly's quietude and
comfort were concerned, straightway Mr. Lewes
emerged from his study and, as the culprit related,
coaxed and soothed her as if she had been a child.

This, I believe, is the single occasion on which
the close friendship of these two noble and con-
trasted women was for a moment clouded.

Contrasted they were physically and intellectu-
ally. Barbara Bodichon, nde Leigh Smith, was
everything that George Eliot was not. If the rare
lot of supernumerary gifts ever fell to any woman,
that one was the foundress of Girton College. Not
that she was an Admirable Crichton in petticoats.
Although half her life was spent in France and she
married a Frenchman, she never mastered French
grammar or idiom. To the last she would speak
of d ma maison instead of ckez moi. She could
no more spell her own language than could Queen
Elizabeth. Although very fond of music, she never

62 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

acquired sufficient facility to play the simplest of
Haydn's easy sonatas. Except, indeed, as a delight-
ful artist in water-colours, and in that field regarded
as an amateur, she might be described as the most
unaccomplished member of a highly distinguished
milieu.

But she was destined to live amonor the ofreat,
and what in ordinary cases would have proved
a disastrous upbringing developed her remarkable
endowments of heart, wit, and brain. Thus was
exemplified Selden's famous saying : " Wit and
wisdom are born with a man." So suited to her
was her early education — in a certain sense, we may
say, lack of it — that when twelve years old every-
thing she said was worth listening to ; without an
approach to precociousness, she talked well. Later,
alike in English and in French, despite utter dis-
regard of grammar and syntax, she was a brilliant
and suggestive talker. I have heard Frenchmen
extol her conversational powers, so full was it of wit,
acuteness, and originality.

And if she failed in perhaps the one personal
object nearest her heart, if she is still regarded as
an amateur by connoisseurs and the art-world
generally, she has achieved a rare and enviable
reputation. What indeed do not two generations
of English-speaking women already owe her in the
matter of education, and to-day what do not her sex
owe her } To be one of the first, most intrepid, and

SUCCESS AND HONOUR 63

most liberal advocates of parliamentary equality, at
last has come posthumous triumph. Let us hope
that the newly enfranchised will prove themselves
worthy of the privilege !

To Mr. and Mrs. Lewes came years of almost
seclusion, fabulous prosperity, alike intellectual and
material, but the ambition of Grace and Amelia was
not fulfilled. No royal honours were showered
upon the greatest novelist of the age by the
sovereign characterised as " sour and unattractive "
by another "illustrious Victorian."^ No Order of
Merit for women was likely to be instituted by a
queen who said that suffragettes ought to be whipt.^
But George Eliot held the reading world in fee. I
have heard on excellent authority that Romola
brought her a cheque for ;^8ooo down. And
good fortune was wisely made the best of by both.
A pretty country house was purchased at Witley in
Sussex, drives in their own carriage replaced the
long walks of earlier days, Mrs. Lewes saying to her
friend Barbara, who visited them in their new home :

"Of course jj/6»2^ did not acknowledge us till we
kept a carriage."

She could jest then, but the days of playfulness
were short. Their holiday had come too late for
overworked brains and physiques of hardly normal
robustness.

^ See Recollections by Viscount Morley (Macmillan, 1917).
^ See Diary of Queen Victoria.

64 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

Mr. Lewes died in 1878, and on the morning
of May 6, 1880, Madame Bodichon received a
note from her great friend saying that she was to
be married that day to Mr. J. W. Cross. I cannot
do better that cite the following passage from
Chambers s EncyclopcBdia, written by R. Holt
Hutton :

" After the death of Mr. Lewes, George Eliot,
who was always exceedingly dependent upon some
one person for affection and support, fell into a
very melancholy state, from which she was rescued
by the solicitous kindness and attention of Mr. John
Cross, an old friend of her own and of Mr. Lewes's,
and to him she was married on the 6th of May
1880. Their married life lasted but a few months.
George Eliot died in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, on
the 22nd of December of the same year, and is
buried in Highgate Cemetery in the grave next
to that of Mr. Lewes."

Madame Bodichon outlived her by eleven years,
but thrice happier for her had it been otherwise.

Always endeavouring to crowd the activities
and achievements of a dozen lives into one, both
bodily and mental powers gave way under the
strain. Restfulness she never knew, and the close
of a noble and fruitful life was of sad helplessness
and invalidism. The crowning monument to her
memory is her College of Girton.

Mr. Cross's biography of George Eliot is a

A PREDICTION 65

classic, but It must not be forgotten that he is a
noteworthy Dante scholar.^ We have read how
among her last literary recreations were Dante
studies under his guidance, and we can understand
how she would glow over the lines :

" Light intellectual replete with love,
Love of true good replete with ecstasy.
Ecstasy that transcendeth every sweetness."

How satisfactory the reflection that the
biographer was in every respect worthy of his
subject, as he had been of the love and confidence
called forth by his devotion.

Let me in conclusion allude, not to the creator
of Hetty Sorrel or Silas Marner, of Mr. Casaubon,
Dorothea, and Celia, but to the deep thinker on
grave problems. Is not genius prescient always,
the poet ever a seer, the "greatly dreaming" man
or woman ever a prophet ?

During one of those long talks in the Isle of
Wight, 1870-187 1, the subject of Governments
came up.

"A time will of course come, dear Barbara,"
said George Eliot, in her slowly enunciated, thought-
ful way, "when royalties will disappear" (I believe
the word " caste " was used also, but am not sure).
" Kings and queens will be pensioned off, with
cushions for their feet."

^ See hnpressions of Dante and of the New Worlds by J. W.
Cross (Blackwood, 1903).

66 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

Are we not much nearer this period than we
think ? Are not all thrones tottering, Habsburgs
and HohenzoUerns trembling before Time and his
hour-glass, inherited privileges, unearned pre-
rogatives doomed to speedy and eternal disappear-
ance ? Let us hope so.

I add a note from Mr. Cross :

Queen Anne's Mansions,
St. James's Park, S.W.,
July 6, 1908.

Dear Miss Betham-Edwards, — Many thanks
for your note, which has been forwarded to me here.
At this time of the year I am always more in
London than in Tunbridge Wells. It is indeed
long since I have had the pleasure of seeing you,
and I had never heard that you had been laid up.
But I am very glad to hear that you are now fairly
well again. I should very much enjoy coming
over one afternoon for a chat, and I will try if I
can manage it ; but I am going away shortly to
Switzerland, and my time is very much occupied
in the meanwhile. However, if I can't get to
Hastings before going abroad, I will certainly come
over when I return, as I should like to see you
again and exchange views with you. — Yours very
sincerely, J. W. Cross.

Here is the only letter I ever received from
George Eliot, and a charming one it is ; her
exquisite handwriting in itself a lesson to us all,
scribblers that we are !

THE ONLY LETTER 67

The Priory, 21 North Bank,
Regent's Park, January 5, 1872.

My dear Miss Edwards, — We have been to
Weybridge for a few days, and I did not succeed
in finding a few minutes to thank you for your
letter on Monday morning before we set out.

Any sign of remembrance from you will always
be welcome, even without such sweet and en-
couraging words as you wrote about what I have
done.

I am rather a wretch just now, apt to be more
conscious of a disordered liver than of all the
better things in the world. I hope you are freer
than you were from such bodily drawbacks.
Madame Belloc assured me that you were, and that
you looked unusually strong.

Mr. Lewes and I often revive the memory of
you with pleasure (it is about the anniversary of our
acquaintance with you) ; he unites his wishes with
mine that the year may bring you new blessings. —
Always yours sincerely, M. E. Lewes.

Yet a postscript more about the foundress of
Girton College and George Eliot's most intimate
friend.

Long ago Madame Bodichon's writings ought to
have been collected, edited, and published by some
grateful beneficiary of her foundation. Not a bit of
it ! As I have before said, and I reaffirm it now,
the disloyalty, ingratitude, and jealousy of women
towards each other is flagrant and will ever with

68 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

me remain an unanswerable objection to women's
political advancement.

Here is a list of these terse, lucid, admirably-
written expositions, in so far as I know not one
having been reprinted. Most likely Girtonians have
never heard of them, and if so, would very likely
shake their heads over "poor, second-rate stuff."
See "On the Girl of the Period," Mr. Frederic
Harrison, Foi'-tnightly Review, February 191 8, true
as the satire is biting.

(i) A brief Summary in plain language of the
most important Laws of England con-
cerning Women, together with a few
observations thereon," by Barbara L. S.
Bodichon. Third edition with additions.
Trubner&Co. London, 1869. Price is.

(ii) Reasons for and against the Enfranchise-
ment of Women, by Mrs. Bodichon.
Spottiswoode & Co. London, 1869.
(iii) I llustratio7is of the Operation of our Laws
as they affect the Property, Earnings,
and Maintenance of Married Women.
Edinburgh, 1867. Price id.

(No name given, but undoubtedly the
work of Madame Bodichon. A marginal
note points to a knowledge of French
law, unlikely to be possessed by an
Englishwoman.)

WILLIAM SMITH 69

A generation earlier, wrote Herbert Spencer
{Autobiography, p. 149), a conspicuous part had
been played in public life by Madame Bodichon's
father, Mr. William Smith, for many years Member
of Parliament for Norwich. His were times during
which immense sums were lost over contested elec-
tions, and he is said to have spent three fortunes
in thi^ way : not for the gratification of personal
ambition, but prompted by patriotic motives. For,
himself a Unitarian, he was the leading representa-
tive of the much-oppressed Dissenters, and it was he
who, by untiring efforts, finally succeeded in obtain-
ing the abolition of the Test and Corporation Acts.
Various of his descendants have been conspicuous
for their public spirit, philanthropic feeling, and
cultivated tastes. From the eldest son, his father's
successor in Parliament, descended Mr. Benjamin
Leigh Smith, whose achievements as an Arctic
explorer are well known, and Madame Bodichon, of
note as an amateur artist and active in good works.
One of the daughters became Mrs. Nightingale of
Lea Hurst, and from her, besides Lady Verney,
came Miss Florence Nightingale.

Among the younger sons was Mr. Octavius
Smith, who might be instanced in proof of the truth
— very general but not without exception — that
originality is antagonistic to receptivity. For
having in early life been somewhat recalcitrant
under the ordinary educational drill, he was in later

70 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

life distinguished not only by independence of
thought, but by marked inventiveness — a trait
which stood him in great stead in the competition
which, as the proprietor of the largest distillery in
England, he carried on with certain Scotch rivals.
Energetic in a high degree, and having the courage
and sanguineness which comes from continued suc-
cess, he was full of enterprises, sundry of them for
public benefit. Partly because of the personal
experiences he had in various directions of the
obstacles which governmental interferences put in
the way of improvement, and partly as a conse-
quence of the fact that, being a man of vigour and
resource, he was not prone to look for that aid from
State agencies which is naturally invoked by incap-
ables, he was averse to the meddling policy, much
in favour then, and still more in favour now. One
leading purpose of Social Statics being that of
setting forth both the iniquity and the mischief of
this policy, a lady who knew Mr. Octavius Smith's
views planned an introduction ; and this having been
made, there was initiated an acquaintanceship which
afterwards grew into something more.

I have been very fortunate in my friendships,
and not the least so in that with Mr. Octavius
Smith. In later years I owed to him the larger
part of my chief pleasures in life.

The Member for Norwich was an original, and
evidently loved to contravene social mandates,

WIT AND HUMOUR 71

taking his little daughters out for drives on Sunday
in their ordinary frocks and pinafores, and other-
wise throwing the gauntlet at public opinion — even
objecting to the shibboleth, as he regarded it, of
baptism.

How proud would he have been had he lived
to see the fruition of his efforts ! How he would
have gloried in Barbara's name and fame! It was
not to be. But there is fortunately a prescience
in the parental mind. Doubtless as the old man
lay dying with the map of Algeria on his pillow,
reminder of that beloved child lono- since lost to
him in a double sense — by a French marriage and
by a thousand miles of sea — he felt that she would
do more and more credit to his name as the years
wore on, and that without vaingloriousness he could
here take credit to himself.

Here are a few samples of Madame Bodichon's
wit, humour, and repartee.

On high thought and small snobberies :

" I lunched the other day at the Deanery (with
Dean and Lady Augusta Stanley) to meet Mr.
Gladstone. There was served a cut gooseberry
pie. That pie doing double duty is a standing
lesson to my housekeeper, and now she has to bring
to table pies that have been begun."

On other snobberies :

" My leg-of-mutton dinners, as I call them, I
began in Algeria. Whenever rich people dined

72 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

with me, I gave them just anything. When poorly
paid French functionaries were invited, I always
provided a sumptuous repast."

(In London the leg-of-mutton dinners were also
the rule, and not, perhaps, always accepted with a
good grace. When the table was set the hostess
would also go round with a bottle of water, and
well dilute the half-filled decanters of sherry and
claret. )

Madame Bodichon had a rough-and-ready way
of treating practical details. When travelling with
her in Spain, she found me puzzling over pesetas,
doubloons, and the rest.

" Why trouble your little head about Spanish
money ? " she said, and bringing out her purse laid
on the table an English shilling, a two-shilling
piece, a half-sovereign, and a sovereign. " Now,"
she added, poising each coin and its Spanish
equivalent by turns on her finger, " the weight of
gold and silver will tell you nearly enough what the
money represents." A neat and expeditious way of
doing international sums, it seemed to me.

Other travelling maxims were equally original :

" Always travel with plenty of luggage. You
are then sure to meet with attention and get the
best of everything."

Another maxim, appropriate nowadays to France
as well as to the Spain of forty years ago, was
this":

SHREWDNESS AND MISJUDGMENT 73

" Stand on the platform by your handbags, and
look helpless."

In many a provincial station to this day no
porters appear : the traveller on arriving has to
address himself to the stationmaster for help with
hand luggage.

An advanced Liberal, a warm advocate of social
reform, a practical-minded thinker, this noble
Englishwoman was not always keen-sighted either
in political matters or judging character.

" Thank Heaven," she said exuberantly, when
John Bright's motion according votes to the agri-
cultural labourer was passed, " we who are living
now at least shall see no more Tory regimes in
England."

The Act was followed by twenty years of
Conservative government !

Misreading of character, or rather enthusiasm
carried to the point of infatuation, would lead to
cruellest disillusion. Upon one occasion she was
thus nonplussed.

After a prolonged eulogy of some new protdg^e,
whose numberless gifts and charms were to raise
her to social and intellectual eminence, — who was,
indeed, to set the world on fire in many places, —
I asked mildly :

" What has this paragon, this feminine Ad-
mirable Crichton, achieved thus to raise your
expectations ? "

74 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

She thought for a moment or two, and at last
got out :

" Well, she has given birth to a beautiful
baby."

"My dear friend," I retorted, "she will not
attain immortality by becoming the mother of a
baby, however beautiful."

Like Herbert Spencer, whom she knew well,
she loved to propound questions.

Thus, especially to younger friends, she would
put the ethical problem :

" Would you rather possess beauty, or be the
cause of beauty in others ? "

She said that with herself the latter choice would
kick the beam, meaning that the gift of physical
attractions and charm, of sesthetic gifts, opportunities,
and surroundings, would be outweighed by the
power of putting all these in some measure within
reach of others not thus endowed.

On men's choice of wives :

" What men like in women is something that
smiles. Many prefer little rags of women."

On her sex's lot :

"Child-bearing is the battle-field of women."

On a sentimental lady saying, after revisiting
the scenes of her early youth, that she felt as if
by a longer stay she should recover her " childish
innocence " :

" I hope you have not lost it, have you ?"

WISDOM AND WIT 75

On Victor Hugo's dramas :

" To my thinking they are as fine as Shake-
speare's."

On Zola and his school :

" Such stories are the reverse of realism. They
are non-realistic because they do not represent life
as it is."

On marriage (rather an unkind hit) :

" Nothing delights me more than to hear of any
man being refused by a woman. Such experiences
put men in their right place."

On George Eliot :

" I suppose the time will come when all educated
folks will write like George Eliot."

Presumably her meaning was that slipshod
futility would give way to well-thought-out utter-
ances and expressions, also to strictly philosophic
studies of life and human nature.

To a friend who had given her a somewhat
idealised photograph of herself — a quite anti-
Aristotelian view, by the way, and suggestive of
Cromwell :

" Take this back, and give me one with all your
lines in it."

To the students of her college of Girton :

" You must make laws for yourselves."

About herself and her unorthodoxy, alike
voluntary and involuntary :

" I am a rich woman, and therefore when I die
10

^6 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

there will be no fuss about burying an unbaptized
person in consecrated ground."

On setting up in her own house a night-school
for farming lads — the teacher being a Wesleyan,
and the teaching non-sectarian :

" I need not fear clerical interference, because I
am rich."

Of novels :

" Folks must die in real life ; why they should
die in novels I never could see."

Of friends :

" Some of our friends are roses, some are

cabbages. Mrs. is a first-rate cabbage." To

this a witty friend added : " And some are thorns ! "

In our Spanish travels I had excused extortion
on the part of a guide because he was a very old
man. She retorted : " Old age is no virtue."

On French amiability :

" The reason of French good nature is that
children in France are always allowed their own
way, their tempers not being soured by perpetual
crossing and nagging."

On a prematurely aged and beardless man :

" So-and-so looks like the mummy of a boy."

On a book of travel dealing with art galleries,
written by one uninitiated in art :

" The point that struck me about the book was
the skill with which the writer has concealed her
ignorance."

PRACTICAL ^^

On a new novel by a friend :

** Your story has only one fault — there is no
point in it."

We can generally appraise folks — i.e. thinking
folks — by their maxims. A favourite citation with
her was from the Koran : "If you have only enough
money in your purse wherewith to buy flowers or
bread, choose flowers and let the bread go."

Yet, intense as was her love of beauty, she ever
remained practical of the practical. With her, in
the words of the great Locke, "knowledge was
seeing." Holding a few wild flowers in her hand,
she would make the uninitiated understand points of
vegetable physiology not easily got at through books.

And as there are limitations even in the highest
developments of intellect and character, so was it
here. Herbert Spencer somewhere says that the
proposition, two parallel lines can never meet, is
unverifiable, because two parallel lines can never
be followed infinitely. With Madame Bodichon,
knowledge was seeing, as far as it went ; but there
ever remained the beyond, the unverifiable.

Had her brother, Benjamin Leigh Smith, as she
fondly hoped, discovered the North Pole in 1870-71,
her first query on his return would have been :

"Well, Ben, and what lies beyond?"

Like the immortal Vathek of " England's richest
son," she "wished to know everything; even
sciences that did not exist."

78 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

On the Grand Peut-etre of Rabelais, the ques-
tions that have occupied philosophers and mystics
since Plato's Phsedo, she remained silent. So beset
was she, not by a sense of her rights, but of her
duties, that, like Wilberforce, she " had no time to
think about her soul." Confident in the causes for
which she had sacrificed so much, rationalist in the
highest sense of the word, ardently believing that
humanity was on the upward path, she accepted the
inevitable with unswerving courage and calm.
Neither disillusion, broken health, pain, nor grief
had power to shake that commanding spirit. In a
certain vital sense she was as unpractical as the
most flighty-headed. A woman of ardent faith in
individuals and causes and of abnormal activities,
Goethe's excellent maxim for intellectual workers,
"unhasting, unresting," she could never take to
heart, always trying to make twelve hours do the
duty of twenty-four, always taxing her mental and
physical powers to the straining point.

I used to say to her : " My dear friend, excellently
as you husband your material resources, in another
and equally important sense you are ever on the
verge of insolvency, without a pennyworth of
reserve force to your credit."

And, true enough, bankruptcy came upon her
as a thief in the night.

Barbara Bodichon was a spirited and convincing
writer on the subjects she had at heart, but lacked

LOSS OF TAPERS 79

one invaluable sense — she could not read character,
could not understand that others were less generous
than herself. Thus we were chatting in her latter
days, when she suddenly said :

"Now, Milly " (my family pet name), "you
must write my life."

" Nothing easier, my dear friend," I replied,
"nothing more to my mind; but remember one
thing. Rich women like yourself should make their
wills long before, owing to mental and bodily failure,
they fall into the clutches of toadies, sycophants,
lick-spittlers, and other two-footed parasites whose
names are leorion in human form. And in makino-
your will trust only to the disinterested, the Man
of Law."

She did not take my advice, and what be-
came of the many precious documents thus falling
into parasitic clutches her oldest friends never
learned.

One or two would have straightway been re-
turned to myself by any person possessed, say, of
the faintest approach to honesty and self-respect.
The first was a most careful transcript I had made
of Barbara's prolonged stay in the Slave States of
America before the war — a most interesting piece
of history. Other papers of her own I had
laboriously copied and revised. Then there were
very valuable letters of noteworthy people, English,
French, and American ; autographs that would fetch.

8o GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

and doubtless did fetch for the purloiner, large sums
— all, all swooped upon as the carrion kite swoops
upon her prey.

As I have before insisted upon, women are very
disloyal to each other.

Will it be believed that in a long article
on Women's Education in Chambers's invaluable
EncyclopcEdia, and which is written by a woman,
the name of Barbara Bodichon, the foundress of the
first university for women in England, is not so
much as mentioned}

" Barbara Bodichon's portrait is in every
European picture gallery," was wont to say an
artist friend. Titianesque, indeed, were her superb
colouring, golden hair, blue eyes perhaps too
prominent, perfectly shaped mouth, and features
humanly, not classically, beautiful. There was here
no cold, stately classicism. Life exuberant and
exuberating to the very full emanated from her
presence, an afflatus once calling forth Browning's
ejaculation :

" Madame Bodichon, what a benediction to see
you ! "

And a benediction to how many was her friend-
ship !

As I am now taking leave of George Eliot and
her circle, I here interpolate an interesting passage
from Herbert Spencer.

In 1850 he writes (vol. i. p. ^ill) '•

HERBERT SPENCER'S OPINION 8i

*' Already I have mentioned the fact that in the
spring of 1850 I met Mr. G. H. Lewes, and that
in the course of a walk home from a soiree a
conversation between us produced mutual interest.
When Social Statics came out he spoke highly of
it, both privately and in public as literary editor of
the Leader ; and naturally, when we met again, a
further step was taken towards intimacy. As we
had many tastes and opinions in common, the
intimacy grew rapidly.

"When the summer came there resulted country
excursions together — the early ones being long
Sunday rambles in Wimbledon Park, Richmond
Park, etc., a companion on the first occasion being
Mr. E. S. Pigott, now Licenser of Plays, and at
that time interested in the Leader as one who sub-
scribed part of the capital. Later in the season our
excursions took a wider range. The longest of
them was up the valley of the Thames — by railway
to Slough and thence on foot to Cookham, where
we slept ; next day we went along on the Thames-
bank by Marlow and on to Henley, where our day's
walk ended; leaving there on the Monday we reached,
by the help of a coach-drive, Pangbourne, and
eventually Goring, where we stopped for the night ;
and next day we walked as far as Abingdon, whence
we returned by railway. The expedition was a
memorable one for both of us ; not only because of
its enjoyments, which were great, but also because of
its mental results. It was to the impulse he received
from the conversations during these four days that
Lewes more particularly ascribed that awakened

82 GEORGE ELIOT AND MADAME BODICHON

interest in scientific inquiries which is referred to
in an extract from his diary published in George
Eliot's Life. And in me, observations on the forms
of leaves set going a train of thought which ended
in my writing an essay on ' The Laws of Organic
Form,' an extended exposition of which occupies
some space in the Principles of Biology. Later in
the autumn, Kent was the scene of another ramble,
Gravesend, Maidstone, and Cobham being among
the places on our route. Lewes remarked at its
close that the ramble had not been so rich in sug-
gestions as the preceding one ; but he had brought
with him a volume by Milne- Edwards, and in it
for the first time I met with the expression, ' the
physiological division of labour,' Though the con-
ception was not new to me, as is shown towards the
end of Social Statics, yet the mode of formulating
it was ; and the phrase thereafter played a part in
my course of thought.

"As a companion, Lewes was extremely at-
tractive. Interested in and well informed upon
a variety of subjects, full of various anecdote, and
an admirable mimic, it was impossible to be dull in
his company. Nowadays he is chiefly known by
the contributions to philosophy in his Problems of
Life and Mind ; but his reputation was then mainly
that of an extremely versatile man — a critic and
writer on general literature, a novelist, a dramatist,
an actor, an expositor of philosophy. This last
combination recalls a droll incident in his career. He
delivered a series of lectures on philosophy in the
provinces, and, among other places, in Edinburgh.

G. H. LEWES 83

There, after his last lecture had been given, the
play-bills announced the Merchant of Venice, with
Mr. Lewes in the part of Shylock. The dramatic
element in the performance was, I doubt not, good,
and I dare say his dramatic faculty justified the
thought which he at one time entertained of going
upon the stage ; but his figure was not sufficiently
impressive for many parts, and his voice was not
effective.

" I knew nothing in those days of his domestic
life, nor, indeed, of anything concerning him beyond
that which our conversations disclosed. But alike
then and afterwards I was impressed by his forgiv-
ing temper and his generosity. Whatever else may
be thought, it is undeniable that he discharged the
responsibilities which devolved upon him with great
conscientiousness and at much cost in self-sacrifice,
notwithstanding circumstances which many men
would have made a plea for repudiating them."

IV

A VISIT TO BARON TAUGHNITZ

Since 1872 my works have regularly appeared
from the Tauchnitz Press, greatly to my own
advantage and, as I hope, not without amusement
and instruction to Continental readers. One fact
let me affirm. Had Baron Tauchnitz never paid
English authors a penny, their gain would all the
same have been immense. He obtained for them a
vast, an unimaginably vast, public. No author, says
•' the wise-browed Goethe," should write unless he
can count his readers by the million. The Leipzig
Press brings us our million !

I was staying at Eisenach in 1880 when an
invitation reached me from Schloss Kleinschocher.
Nothing could be more agreeable than the prospect
of two or three days in a country house just then.
The season was June ; woods and breezy walks lie
within reach of Luther's town, but the place itself
was becoming hot, crowded, and noisy. Pianoforte
practice rendered the hotel insupportable by day,
and supper-parties in the gardens adjoining made

sleep impossible till long past midnight. At the

84

BARON TAUCHNITZ 85

Leipzig station Baron Tauchnitz met me, little
changed since I had seen him just ten years before.
But for the slight accent of his otherwise excellent
English, you might have taken the great publisher
to be an English country gentleman. Half an
hour's drive through a pleasant country brought us
to a mansion worthy of a more musical name.

I was never, I wrote to a friend, in a more
beautiful house : far and wide stretches a wooded
park, whilst immediately around are flower-gardens
and sweeps of turf so velvety as to recall our own
lawns. And everything is of a piece within. We
realise at once that we are not only in a most sumptu-
ous home, but in one of the happiest and most cul-
tured. Not that luxury is allowed to lend a material
aspect. At Schloss Kleinschocher we breathe a
literary atmosphere as completely as in the modest
drawing-rooms of savants and littdrateurs at Leipzig.
On the tables of salon and boudoir lay the latest and
best works in English, French, and German. The
hostess, a grey-haired, tall, graceful lady, with very
gentle manners, and her daughter, who welcomed
me so kindly, — alas ! with her parents this dearly-
loved daughter is no longer among the living, —
testified by their conversation to the widest culture.
When Baron Tauchnitz — then the younger — with
his charming wife joined us at the two o'clock family
dinner, we talked — and, of course, in English — of
books, music, and the drama. The drama, indeed.

86 A VISIT TO BARON TAUCHNITZ

forms so important an element in German life that it
may be said to be part of daily existence. Baron
Tauchnitz, with a smile, soon reminded me of this,
and also of another fact — namely, of his excellent
memory.

" When you first stayed in Leipzig," he said
(just ten years before), " you witnessed Lohengrin.
To-night, if agreeable, my daughter will accompany
you to see Preciosa!'

True enough, a seat in the Tauchnitz opera-box
had been placed at my disposal on my former visit,
and in company of the Baron and his son I had
then enjoyed a first-rate performance of Wagner's
opera ; but it surprised me to find the incident
remembered by one so busy. A stroll in the
gardens, a visit from the grandchildren, tea, and the
opera, filled that first pleasant day at Schloss Klein-
schocher — Schloss Tauchnitz, I feel inclined to
call it.

"Now you shall see my library, the real Tauch-
nitz library," said my host next morning, leading me
to a large, handsome room, devoted to the 3040
volumes known under that name. At the time I
write of, the number was much less, but already
made a goodly show, the little volumes being all
neatly yet handsomely bound in maroon calf with
gilt lettering and edges, and placed in a handsome
bookcase reaching from floor to ceiling. Truly the
Baron has reason to be proud of his library — now

THE LIBRARY 87

doubled ; what author of voluminous works more
so ? No English-speaking person, least of all a
contributor to the series, can gaze on this collection
without feelings of pride and pleasure.

There are two circumstances especially to be
borne in mind when reviewing Baron Tauchnitz's
achievement : first and foremost, the originality of
the undertaking ; secondly, the high principles on
which it has ever been conducted. When the
felicitous notion of popularising English literature
on the Continent first entered the Baron's mind, the
only means of procuring an English book was to
write to London for it. No international copyright
existed, consequently any foreign publisher could
reissue works printed in this country without asking
an author's permission, to say nothing of paying for
the privilege. Baron Tauchnitz entertained too
much respect for literature in general, and for
English literature in particular, to dream of such a
system. He preferred the open, the magnanimous
course, thereby not only furthering the progress of
international intercourse, but paving the way for
international copyright. The little Tauchnitz
volume, so portable, so inexpensive, so well printed,
forms a kind of literary currency : it prevents the
English resident abroad from feeling exiled ; it
passes from hand to hand, spreading a knowledge
alike of our classics and contemporary authors ;
lastly, it has been a powerful protest against the

88 A VISIT TO BARON TAUCHNITZ

piratical principle, the notion that sharpness in
business may well take the place of straightforward
dealing. To authors the gain has been twofold, the
Baron not only adding very considerably to their
incomes, but also establishing their reputation on the
Continent.

Hardly less interesting than his Tauchnitz library
at Schloss Kleinschocher is my host's collection of
portraits and autograph letters. The photos of
many English authors are here, whilst from all
writers included in the Continental Series the Baron
has received letters.

Take the following Sterne-like line from
Thackeray :

" Don't be afraid of your English ; a letter con-
taining £ s. d. is always in pretty style."

Equally characteristic is the crabbed utterance
of Carlyle :

" No transaction could be handsomer on your
part. . . . The money account concerns me. Please
attend to that as already said. Friendliness and help
cannot be paid, but money can and always should."

How warm-hearted the frank sentences of
Dickens :

" I have too great a regard for you and too high a
sense of your honourable dealings to wish to depart
from the custom we have already observed. What-
ever price you put upon the book will satisfy me."

TRIBUTES 89

The author of Lothair wrote with equal cordial-
ity, but in a wholly different style :

"The sympathy of a great nation is the most
precious reward of authors, and an appreciation that
is offered us by a foreign people has something
of the character which we attribute to the fiat of
prosperity. I accept your liberal enclosure in the
spirit in which it is offered, for it comes from a
gentleman whose prosperity always pleases me, and
whom I respect and regard."

Here is an amusing extract from Longfellow :

" Your very generous addition to the original
sum agreed upon between us is pleasant to me, less
for the sum itself than for the trait of character it
reveals in you and the proof of your liberal dealing.
The contingency you allude to — namely, of my em-
ploying another Continental publisher — is about as
remote as that of one of Dickens's characters, who
bought at an auction a brass door-plate with the
name of Thompson on it, thinking it possible that
her daughter might marry someone of that name ! "

The great publishing house familiar to every
English-speaking traveller on the Continent is not
to be confounded with an earlier and famous
business of the same name. So early as 1796
Christopher Tauchnitz set up a printing press in
Leipzig, from which latter were issued the cheap
and handy

" Little Greek books with the funny type
They get up well at Leipzig,"

90 A VISIT TO BARON TAUCHNITZ

of which Robert Browning's Bishop Blougram
speaks. These classics are still published by the
million.

A nephew of this Christopher, Bernhard, first
Baron von Tauchnitz, was destined to be not only a
great publisher, but what the late Cotter Morison
called "A moral inventor." Born in 1816, follow-
ing the trade of his uncle, he began his Continental
Series in 1 841, of which 2600 had appeared in the
following fifty years. Ennobled in i860, this prince
of pioneers was created one of the few Saxon life-
peers in 1877. He died in 1895, surrounded by

"That which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends."

Of the second Baron, alas ! (19 18) I cannot now
get news. In my desk lies one of those familiar
registered notes dated Leipzig, July 24, 19 14,
sealed with a T and containing a cheque and an
agreement for my penultimate novel From an
Islington Window. Thus runs the last sentence of
a document that has almost a historic interest :

" I am sorry to say," wrote the right hand and
maybe partner of my old friend, " that the Baron
has not yet recovered from the severe illness which
had befallen him in i^sic) Spring. He is a little
better, but the doctors cannot yet say when he will
be completely restored to health. — With kind
regards, yours sincerely, Curt Otto."

A few days later war was declared with

WHAT NEXT? 91

Germany. My book, of course, was never pub-
lished, and Dr. Otto was soon fighting against us.
What became of him I do not know.

The Tauchnitz Continental Series came to an
abrupt end, and to this day I cannot get news of
the Baron. From his former English publisher
and agents I obtain a similar reply. They can
tell me nothing, and "a letter from me to Leipzig
would do him harm."

Does he live still, and under what conditions ?
Has his colossal and honourably amassed fortune
been wrenched from him ? Perhaps none of his
English friends will ever learn further news of
their handsome, polished, affable host of the princely
Schloss Kleinschocher.

II

V

AN AFTERNOON WITH LORD JOHN
RUSSELL

"The chief political figure in fifty years of EngUsh history" (Lord
Houghton to Lord Granville, Jan. 17, 1875).

It was in 1865 that I spent a long afternoon in
the company of the " Lycurgus of the Lower
House," as Sydney Smith styled the statesman on
whom devolved the memorable honour of proposing
the first Reform Bill.

From childhood I had been familiarised in
Punch with the figure of "the little great man,"
almost dwarfed by his enormous hat, and who, like
the great Sir Isaac Newton, was so diminutive at
birth that he could be cradled in a quart pot ! Our
rather rough but good-natured rector, who, like the
great Ipswich Cardinal, was a butcher's son, used
occasionally to get numbers of the famous Charivari
founded in 1841, and he never failed to bring them
for us to enjoy. And just as willingly he would
lend a pair of his own trousers to some needy
parishioner unable to buy black for a funeral.

Thus, having already written two or three novels,

LORD JOHN RUSSELL 93

and travelled (rather lived) for a spell in Paris,
Germany, and Vienna, I could fully appreciate the
following invitation from Mrs. and Mr. (afterwards
Sir Edwin) Chadwick : Would I lunch at Richmond
the following day and afterwards accompany them
with Lord and Lady Russell on a visit of inspection
to the Poor Law School at Southall ?

The Chadwicks were friends of Madame
Bodichon, and I had already made their acquaint-
ance. Nothing, therefore, could have been more
agreeable than the proposed excursion.

Punctually to the moment, hosts and guests
reached our half-way rendezvous. It had been
arranged that the two carriages — in one. Lord and
Lady Russell ; in the second, my hosts and self —
should meet at a certain spot in the Hammersmith
Road ; and true enough, there we were. But it was
not till we reached our destination that I stood face
to face with Lord John Russell.

Just ten years before, on the fall of the Derby
Ministry, the outgoing Prime Minister had written
to Lord Granville, saying, " I am very sorry that
the country will lose one of the best Foreign
Secretaries it ever had. . . . ' Tu Marcellus
eris: "

I may as well take it for granted that some
of my readers, like myself, have "small Latin and
less Greek " ; but Mr. Frederic Harrison, whose
scholarship seems at his fingers' ends as in earlier

94 LORD JOHN RUSSELL

days, enables me to explain the allusion. "Ah,
unhappy boy " (Virgil, ^neid, book vi. 1. 884),
" if you break the bitter fates, you will be
Marcellus."

Marcellus, the only son of Octavia the sister of
Augustus and his destined heir, died when nineteen.
In Hades, ^neas was shown his ghost. When
Virgil read this to Octavia, she fainted.

To return to my narrative. Surely the four
quarters of the globe could not have furnished a
greater contrast than the pioneer of reform and
the initiator, we may almost aver the inventor, of
sanitation.

Outwardly there was the difference of breadth,
bulk, and inches ; the contrast of a stalwart middle-
class gentleman in his prime and an undersized
elderly scion of as noble and historic family as any
in England.

Did not, indeed, the great whig house of Russell
trace its origin to Thor, the Hammerer and terror
of giants ?

Sir Edwin Chadwick, Earl Russell's junior by
ten years, came of lowlier stock. Called to the Bar
in 1830, his paper on Life Assurance had attracted
the notice of no less an authority than Jeremy
Bentham, and in 1883, on being named Secretary
of the Poor Law Board, he devoted himself to the
better administration of the Poor Law funds, public
education, and especially to sanitation. If ever any

SIR EDWIN CHADWICK 95

public benefactor deserved a niche in the Abbey it
is he, and where is his statue ?

Drainage was one of his especial subjects, and
some unkind wit prognosticated a sad old age for
its devotee. In his failing years Sir Edwin would
fall a victim to a tragi-comic hallucination. He
would imagine himself transformed into a monster
drain-pipe, its ramifications spread throughout the
entire kingdom.

No such calamity befell him. Sir Edwin enjoyed
a hale old age, and many a pleasant afternoon I
have spent with his charming wife, amiable young
daughter, and himself in their beautiful home at
Richmond.

Lady Russell accompanied us on the expedition
in question, and evidently shared her husband's
interest in the Home and training of the boys,
several hundreds in number.

From the first moment my attention was held
by the contrasted mental attitude of the two men.
Each saw everything from an absolutely different
point of view. Each set out from exactly opposite
premises. Each would be no more likely to as-
similate the other's view than two parallel lines
to meet.

Sir Edwin Chadwick was an animated calculating
machine, a walking squarer of the circle. Earl
Russell's concern was with generalities, with man-
kind in the gross, with the human side of everything.

g6 LORD JOHN RUSSELL

Patiently he listened to our host as he expatiated
upon figures, the cost to a farthing per head of
every child in the school, and also of every item
outside maintenance and instruction. Meantime the
inspection went on, and from dining-hall, school-
rooms, and lavatories we went upstairs.

Here Sir Edwin's pride was really pathetic.
Each occupant of the enormous dormitory we now
entered seemed dear to him as if of his own blood.

It was now late in the afternoon, and the vast
sleeping quarters were flooded with warm effulgence.
Almost blinding was the brilliance of the westering
sun ; one's unlidded eyes might as well have been
exposed on a mountain top !

Will it be believed ? From ceiling to floor
stretched windows, unshuttered, uncurtained, without
blinds, the children therefore being in the position
of Norwegian sight-seers. Hardly sunset, hardly
sundown could be experienced here, from eight at
night till eight in the morning, at this season of the
year daylight prevailing.

Lord Russell looked, listened, hum'd, haw'd whilst
his exuberant host rattled on. Who so hard to be
stopped in his torrent of words as a propagandist ?
At last he turned to Sir Edwin Chadwick with
the remark :

" But what about the children's eyes ? "

The remark betokened the man. Just as in
moments of national and political stress he had seen

ACHIEVEMENTS IN BELLES-LETTRES 97

far beyond immediate results, he now recognised
the stone blindness of benevolent reformers. There
flashed before his vision the blear-eyed, blinking,
permanently injured young toilers to whom sight
was their most precious possession, generation after
generation thus handicapped in the struggle for
daily bread.

Whether the hint was taken, whether ophthalmia
was stayed in its deadly course, I never heard. On
writing lately to the Board of Education for informa-
tion on this and other points, I learned that the
Southall School had long been closed.

I shall never forget those hours spent in the
company of the great Liberal leader, and afterwards
regretted one omission on my part. " Before you
choke me with your praise, Madam," thundered
Johnson to a fair enthusiast, " remember what your
praise is worth." I never venture to compliment
my betters. But might not a word or two as to
Lord John's achievements in belles-lettres from an
accredited authoress have here afforded pleasure ?
How aptly would have come in, say, a quotation
from one of his twenty works, above all from his
romances or two tragedies ! I proudly recall the
fact that my own works and those upon France
were not unknown to him, and that I spent a long
afternoon in the society of the great pioneer of
reform, truly Reddest of Red-letter days in my
calendar !

98 LORD JOHN RUSSELL

The Life of Lord Granville/ 1815-1891, vividly
recalls surely the most nicknamed, or shall I say
pet-named, statesman in history. Johnny he always
was, alike in the mouths of supporters or adversaries.
In 1859 Lord Clarendon wrote to Lord Granville
that a closer acquaintance with the Italian imbroglio
— not to mention other subjects — had, he fancied,
"considerably abated the veni, vidi, vici sort of
feeling with which Johnny had taken possession of
that bed of roses, the Foreign Office."

In 1867 Lord Coleridge wrote to a friend: "I
had a very pleasant dinner with Lord John on
Wednesday. We were but seven. . . . Johnny
remains as you left him — very cocky, restless, and
physically strong." And later on he adds : "I
dined at Chesham Place on Wednesday — an educa-
tion dinner. Bright was to have been there but did
not appear. . . . Lord Russell made a long speech
giving us a history of popular education beginning
with the time of Henry IV. (of France)."

This memorable speech was far in advance of
the time, and Lord Granville wrote to the Duke of
Argyll that he spoke with more power and anima-
tion than he had ever heard him. But it was
a valedictory oration, and fainting fits were
followed by signs of failing strength and diminished
powers.

^ The Life of the Second Earl Granville^ by Lord Edmond
Fitzmaurice. Longmans, 1905.

SELF-CONFIDENCE 99

The wonderful old man (he was now seventy-
five) was far, however, from being an extinct volcano.
These volumes seem to bring his times very near
our own. We here find one politician writing to
another "of the Manchester School and Reform
agitators being quite satisfied with Johnny chief and
Gladstone leader." In 1868 Lord Granville wrote
to Gladstone that " Johnny's proposed public dinner
is a difficult one. If he persists in giving one, I do
not know how you can avoid giving another." The
difificulty was neatly got over. Gladstone's house
was being painted, and it was impossible for him to
give a dinner to the Opposition leaders of the House
of Commons at his own table. Lord John decided
that the "smell of paint being bad for friends at
dinner would not be innocuous to friends in council,"
and the council was held.

Lord John Russell's leading characteristic was
unbounded faith in himself. "The great little man
was unshakably sure of his own judgment," as one
of his biographers has said. "He knew he was
right gives the key to both his career and his
character."

It is pleasant to read that relaxation came in
the way of so indomitable a worker. In 18 19 he
travelled with Tom Moore in Italy, the latter having
crossed the Channel to avoid arrest, despite the fact
that he had lately received three thousand guineas
for Llalla Rookh^ a poem certainly not worth the

loo LORD JOHN RUSSELL

money. Lord John afterwards edited the poet's
works in eight volumes, 1852-56.

One of my own books is named in his biography.
This is Earl of Paris (Hurst & Blackett), in
which is an account of the historic little town of
St. Jean de Loyne in Upper Burgundy.

VI
HENRY JAMES

I

Dear Henry James ! My heart glov/s as I
recall our long, warm friendship, from first to last
not the faintest cloudlet casting, a shadow. We
valued, I may say we loved, each other, with a
brotherly, sisterly affection deeper, more sympathetic
perhaps than are often these blood relationships.
On neither side was there exaggeration or conven-
tionality. Our respective literary achievements for
the most part were not touched upon. Indeed, the
only direct criticism he ever passed on a novel of
mine was the reverse of flattering.

On June 9, 1913, he had written: "I am very
glad to hear of the good fortune of your Lord of
the Harvest " (just included in the Oxford World's
Classics). But alas ! the gilt was soon taken oft
the gingerbread. A little later he paid me a visit,
and referring to the story, which he had read, " I
should have liked more of a tangle," he said ; and,
as far as I remember, that was the only direct

lO'iz ' "HENRY JAMES

allusion he made to any work of mine. Indirectly
I learned from other sources that he especially
valued my studies of French life and literature.
And was not his friendship the highest of all
compliments ?

Our meetings were arranged in this way. I
would get a telegram from Rye, answer prepaid, to
this effect :

" Can you receive me at five o'clock this after-
noon ? " and of course the answer was always Yes.
At five precisely his cab would climb the hill, stop-
ping short at a sharp curve of the road, many
drivers refusing to attempt an ascent so difficult for
their hacks.

Thus it happened now, and well I remember how
laborious and painful the footing of that hundred
yards or so proved to my great visitor. He had
hardly passed his prime, but was ponderously built
and moved with the heaviness of age.

Once having regained breath in my little parlour
on the ground floor — I never invited him to my study
above, although there were many treasures there
that would have interested him — he settled himself
entirely to his satisfaction. The first thing he did
was to study the physiognomy of his hitherto
unknown hostess. Indeed, before opening his lips
he looked me through and through with those large
eyes that seemed to see below the surface of others.
Then, that rather staggering attention over, he

FURNITURE 103

glanced from the window with its matchless view,
wide sweep of sea, red-roofed old town nestled amid
verdant heights, high above the walls of the Con-
queror's castle crowning the panorama.

Next he looked immediately about him, and I
never knew anyone so sensitive to surroundings.

"What a chair is this!" he said. "It has a
positive psychology of its own."

The chair in question was a present to me from
India, of native cane, high-backed, its proportions
exactly suited to the frame and well cushioned ; it
invited to repose but not inanition.

Then, after a glance at the opposite wall, he
added :

" And those fine old engravings."

These were heirlooms, views of my native
Ipswich with its twelve churches and fine river and
of Bury St. Edmunds with its noble Abbey Gate
and ruined tower.

" And yonder magnificent old oak chest ? "

"Ah!" I replied, "that is my most cherished
heirloom."

A bridal chest, perhaps destined for some noble
bride imitating royal example, this curio had long-
been in the De Betham family, and had indeed
served as my mother's linen chest.

It is a most beautiful and highly elaborate
specimen of English workmanship, highly polished,
its panels showing inlaid canaries and pomegranate,

104 HENRY JAMES

fruit and foliage, under the splendid lock inlaid the
figures 1626.

1626, the year of Charles the First's second
Parliament, the year in which, on hearing that Eliot
had branded his favourite Buckingham as Sejanus,
he had uttered the threat, "If then he is Sejanus,
I must be Tiberius " — which he tried to be to
his cost !

Henry James next examined the family portraits
on the side wall, all three sitters of which have a
place in Sir Sidney Lee's Dictionary of National
Biography — the Rev. W. Betham, Sir William
Betham, Ulster king-at-arms, and Matilda Betham.
And here I made an unlucky remark.

"Yonder old cleric, my grandfather," I narrated,
" a curate for the greater part of his life, lived to be
ninety-two and without ever having lost his health
or his temper. A few days before his death, as he
slowly paced the room leaning on my mother's arm,
he made a pun : ' I am walking very slowly, Barbara,
but I am going very fast.' "

" A delightful record, but I could have wished
without the pun," was my visitor's comment.

I took no notes of those delightful monologues,
nor was it necessary ; they imprinted themselves on
the memory.

I remember well his description of Sarah
Bernhardt's impersonation of Jeanne d'Arc, of the
wonderful way with which she baffled her tor-

A GIFT 105

mentors, keeping them at bay, foiling every trap
laid for her tongue.

Of France and French subjects we talked much,
and yet have Henry James's novels found favour in
the land par excellence of crystal clear speech and
logical expression ?

He would sit down to the tea-table, though
rarely taking tea, and of course I could not help
talkinof of his own books. One I mentioned with
great appreciation, the inimitable Three Meetings.
This was on the occasion of his second visit, where-
upon he said quickly :

"You shall have my new book."

"No," I said, glancing at my faithful maid in
attendance, " pray give her one instead."

" Do you like reading ? " he asked ; and on her
hearty reply in the affirmative, he said :

" I will, I will, I will."

True enough, the promise was kept, and some
time after a copy of The Better Sort duly arrived,
having on the fly-leaf the following inscription :

" To Emily Morgan^ with all good wishes.

Henry James."
Jan. 5, 19 1 2.

And with it this letter to myself :

" I can now tell you the sad story of the book
for Emily Morgan, which I am having put up to go
to you with this, as well as explain a little my long
silence. The very day, or the very second after

io6 HENRY JAMES

last seeing you, a change suddenly took place,
under great necessity, in my then current plans and
arrangements. I departed under that stress for
London, practically to spend the winter, and have
come back but for a very small number of days, and
I return there next week.

" ' But,' you will say, ' why didn't you send the
promised volume to E. M. from London, then ? What
matters to us where it came from so longf as it came ? '
To which I reply : ' Well, I had in this house a small
row of books available for the purpose and among
which I could choose. In London I should have to
go and buy the thing, my own production, while I
leave two or three brand-new volumes, which will
be an economy to a man utterly depleted by the
inordinate number of copies of The Outcry which he
has given away and of which he has had to pay for
— his sanguinary (admire my restraint!) publisher
allowing him half ! ' ' Why, then, couldn't you write
home and have one of the books sent you, or have it
sent to Hastings directly from your house ? ' Because
I am the happy possessor of a priceless parlourmaid
who loves doing up books and other parcels and
does them up beautifully, and if the vol. comes to
me here, to be inscribed, I shall then have to do it
up myself, an act for which I have absolutely no
skill and which I dread and loathe, and tumble it
forth clumsily and insecurely. Besides, I was vague
as to which of my works I did have on the accessible
shelf (and I only know I had some, and would have
to look and consider and decide). And the thing
will be beautifully wrapped. * That's all very well :

NATURALISATION 107

but why, then, didn't you write and explain why it
was that you were keeping us unserved and unin-
formed ? ' Oh, because from the moment I go up
to town I plunge, plunge into the great whirlpool of
postal matters, social matters, etc."

I do not give the rest.

Note his redundancy — a couple of pages and
dozens of words when two lines would have sufficed.

His last note, dated August 13, 19 14, thanked
me for my welcoming him "into this ancient fold,"
i.e. his naturalisation as a British subject on the out-
break of the war.

And his last visit — a most delightful one despite
an inauspicious beginning — was paid in the autumn
of that year.

I have already explained that his cab always
stopped just below High Wickham Terrace, drivers
refusing to try their hacks' knees with the short,
sharp upward hundred yards or so, and still
more fearful of their nerves if putting them to the
downward ordeal. Hitherto my visitor had footed
the corner without apparent difficulty. This time
he arrived breathless and almost in a state of
collapse. The intervening years and the war had
aged him greatly.

Fortunately, a physician was at hand. My good

friend and benefactor, Dr. Dodson Hessey, happened

to call just before, and at my instance waited to

renew an acquaintance that had previously proved

\z

io8 HENRY JAMES

highly agreeable to both. "A nice man," had been
Henry James's summing-up after their first meeting,
and, as I have shown, no one was less addicted to
compliments. Vainly did the doctor now advise a
cordial. The very mention of brandy made the
patient worse. However, he did induce him to take
a cup of tea and a slice of bread and butter, these
very seldom indulged in when visiting me, and,
gradually reviving, Henry James was himself again.
A genial, animated, and generous self he became,
giving us of his best.

Over an hour's tripartite conversation we enjoyed,
turning upon literature and winding up with lady
novelists of the day — Miss Braddon, Miss Broughton,
and, gallantly added the author of Daisy Miller :

" Miss Betham-Edwards, whom I love best of
all."

Had he dubbed me a second George Eliot on
the spot, I could not have crowed more.

I give one of the last letters I received from
him. The others appear in his Life.

Lamb House, Rye, Sussex,
August i6, 191 1.

Dear Miss Betham-Edwards, — All thanks for
your kind note. I am back in England, after a
whole year's absence and terrible period of six or
seven months of extreme and confining illness,
mostly in my bed, for six or seven months before
that. I was spoiling for that dire collapse when

A LAST LETTER 109

we last communicated in the autumn of 1909. I
was to have gone over to see you then, but was
in the event unable either to go or to make you
a sign. Then began the very bad time on which
I hope my return to England now will have finally
and strongly closed the gates. I will make you
with pleasure that so long-delayed visit, but I will,
by your leave, wait till the "holiday" (God save
the mark !) turmoil of communication between this
and Hastings shall have somewhat abated. It's
a sorry squeeze now — and long drawn out with
delays. I rejoice to infer that you remain stalwart
and patient and good-humoured — as I try withal
to do — even if we neither of us emulate the surpris-
ing Hale White.^ This is disappointing of him —
a false note in his fine figure. However ! I shall
make you a sign by and by and appear ; and am
all faithfully yours,

Henry James.

^ Mark Rutherford, whose novels he admired. I forget to what
incident this remark refers. Alas! I never saw him again.

VII

AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS,

1831-1890

" A born Amalgam " ^

The foundress of the first chair of learning since
the days of Dorothy Wadham was far and away
the cleverest woman I ever knew. Cousin on the
paternal side, Cockney born and bred, and, in a
creditable sense, precocious of the precocious, when
ten years old she won the prize offered for a
temperance story, and as she grew to womanhood
showed a quite extraordinary capacity for assimilat-
ing knowledge without the drudgery of attaining it.

" I can always teach myself anything better
than I can learn it," she once said to me, and, as
far as I know, she never had an hour's schooling
or a governess at home. Like Topsy, she "grow'd,"
and to a brilliant maturity. If her powers of assimi-
lation did duty for painstaking, so with her did
intuition stand in the place of experience.

Her mother was a lively Irishwoman of the
Walpole family, her father a Peninsular officer, and

^ " In many narrow passages of public life Lord Granville seemed
a born amalgam." — Times Obituary Notice, April i6, 1891.

UNCLE THOMAS ill

she was born in that dreary cul-de-sac Westmorland
Place, City Road, London, in 1830, thus being six
years my senior.

How it came about I know not that, unlike
his brothers, my uncle Thomas did not become a
farmer, but was presented with a commission.

On his retirement on half-pay he obtained a
post in the London and Westminster Bank, thence-
forward spending his yearly fortnight's holiday with
my own family near Ipswich. The most taciturn
of men, he would occasionally be drawn into a
word or two about the battle of Corunna, at which
he had been present, and as he spoke of a com-
manding officer "stepping into the shoes" of his
fallen leader, I used to wonder how this could be,
and how very unlikely it was that the shoes would
fit at all comfortably ! Oddly enough, he had made
friends with a foeman, and in token of good fellow-
ship this French officer, at parting, presented him
with ten guineas to be spent on a ring, which was
done. The ring, containing a single diamond, was
left by Amelia to myself, and proudly I wear such
a precursor of an Entente Cordiale as yet undreamed
of by the most Utopian.

That taciturnity of her father used to trouble
Amelia. " I fear I shall grow as silent as himself,"
she used to say ; a prognostic that fortunately did
not come true. She only spoke one language, her
own, but that one, as she wrote it, with exquisite

112 AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS

purity and elocution, and, as we shall see, she
became a highly appreciated lecturer in the United
States. Her talent for acting and love of the
stage were stimulated by frequent visits to Sadler's
Wells and other places of entertainment, euphe-
mistically described by her mother as "minor
theatres."

How many careers invite the richly endowed !
How difficult is it for the non-gifted to find accept-
ance by any ! Literature, the stage, declamation
were all well within the scope of this rarely gifted
girl, who, although busiest of the busy, ever found
time for frolic and escapade. Nothing delighted
her so much as camouflage — in other words, taking
people in ; as we Suffolkers say, making them look
a gaby.

When with her mother she stayed at our
farmhouse she gave full play to her high spirits,
and of course was allowed pranks.

Thus on entering the schoolroom one day when
we were at tea with our very demure governess, she
took up a thick slice of bread and butter and ex-
claimed, " Who will dare me to throw this out
of the window?" No answer forthcoming, out
went the bread and butter.

Later, she loved to dress up in boy's clothes,
and one day thus disguised frightened a homely
neighbour almost out of her wits. The comely
farmeress was sipping her tea when, acting the

HOURS OF LAUGHTER 113

spruce young Londoner, she suddenly flung herself
on the floor with clasped hands, crying :

" Mrs. Smith, I adore you ! "

Upon another occasion she had been for a
ride with one of my brothers, and, looking very
solemn and speaking under his breath, he said as
he entered the entrance without her :

"Poor Amy" (her pet name) "has had a
bad fall, and I have come for wraps and cushions,
and Dick" (our house lad) "to help me to bring
her in."

Hardly were the words out of his lips than
followed a ringing laugh — oh, what a laugh she
had ! — and the culprit appeared, quite relishing the
excitement she had created.

But Amelia's days of sober work began early.
Before beginning her novels, which, once begun,
followed each other in quick succession, she was
the paid organist of a north London church and
a teacher of harmony and counterpoint. How,
when, and where she acquired so much knowledge,
Heaven knows ! Not only did she understand the
theory of music, but was an accomplished musician,
at home alike on piano, organ, and guitar. To her
I owe my first lessons on the piano, and introduc-
tion to the great masters. Every afternoon she gave
me a music lesson. Fostered in after years, how
much pleasure has this taste afforded me ; and as
I play favourite bits of Beethoven from memory

114 AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS

during winter twilights, I gratefully recall that
painstaking teacher.

Her first novel, My Brothers Wife, appeared
in 1855, and was quickly followed by a warmly
welcomed series, all now accessible in cheap
editions. Earning money as she did, she could
afford travel, and Italy was the lodestar. It is to
these Italian sojourns that we owe her crowning
success, Barbara's History, 1864, which ought to
figure in the World's Classics or some equally
important set of Victorian chefs d'oeuvre.

The story had an immense success, winning a
quite uncommon eulogium in the Times and else-
where. Translations into several European
languages followed, and the authoress immediately
became a persona grata in the eyes of publishers.
One firm lost no time in soliciting a new novel, and
offered her eleven hundred pounds down for a
speedy successor !

Amelia proved a cruel stepmother to her literary
offspring. No sooner had Barbara's History filled
her pockets and set her on a level with the best
Victorian romancers than she turned her back on
story-telling altogether and seemed not to care
a jot what became of Barbaras History and its
brethren. Had she attained the Psalmist's three
score and ten years, quite certainly her next passion,
Egyptology, would have been thrown to the winds
and one or two other subjects as enthusiastically

HONOURS OF SCHOLARSHIP 115

taken up. Who knows ? She might have thrown
herself heart and soul into the Woman's Rights
agitation, and by her brilliant lead and powers of
elocution have antedated victory by a generation.
Not only might we have had in her a powerful states-
woman and party leader, but a lady Prime Minister.

The fates willed otherwise ; very enviably she
died in the plenitude of intellectual powers, and was
thus saved from that death in life — a vacant, inactive,
and colourless old age.

Amelia's good — and in one sense evil — genius
was ever seducing her to fresh fields and pastures
new. And every new literary enterprise added to
her laurels. A Thousand Miles up the Nile, 1877,
was the last turning-point of her career. She
became the foundress and honorary secretary of the
Egyptian Exploration Fund, and devoted all her
energies to Egyptology, contributing papers on the
subject to European and American journals. Her
scholarship brought her several degrees from
America, among these a doctorate from Columbia.
In 1889, not without misgivings on the part of her
friends, she yielded to the solicitations of American
admirers, and with a friend sailed for a lecturing
tour in the United States. The undertaking
ended fatally. In descending an ill-lighted flight
of steps before a lecture, just before embarkation
for home, she slipped down, and, despite the shock
to her system and pain in her head, insisted

ii6 AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS

upon not disappointing the expectant and immense
audience.

She reached England safely, but never recovered
her health, and died in 1889 aged sixty years. She
rests in the churchyard of Westbury-on-Trym near
Bristol, and was followed to the grave by more than
one distinguished Egyptologist, thus showing her
the last honour.

Amelia B. Edwards reaped harvests in many
fields, and among her tides of honour none is more
deserved than that of scholarship.

In 1879 Messrs. Longman issued two volumes
from her pen — A Poetry-Book of Elder Poets and
A Poetry-Book of Modern Poets, English and
American — which for learning, critical acumen, and
comprehensiveness rank with the best works of the
kind in any language. The abundant notes show how
much care she gave to this labour of love. Take the
following Notes to the first series, p. 162 :

Love-slain — Shakespeare :

"Come away, come away, Death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid."

Sad cypress, meaning Cyprus lawn, of which shrouds were made
and which was first made in the Isle of Cyprus.

Also the following on Sir Walter Raleigh's

line :

" Were her tresses angel-gold."

An angel was an old English coin worth about ten shillings and
of a finer quality of gold than that known as crown gold.

NOTES ON POETS Ii7

Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing in his soliloquy about
the sort of woman he could love says: "Fair or I'll never
look on her, Mild or come not near me, Noble or not I for an
angel." The pun upon the two coins, the Noble and the
Angel, seems to have escaped the observation of com-
mentators.

Now for the modern poets. Here is a note
upon J. Blanco White's famous sonnet Night and
Death :

Coleridge pronounced this sonnet the best in the English language,
and Leigh Hunt adds that "in thought it stands supreme,
perhaps above all in any language." Our admiration is
almost exceeded by our wonder when it is remembered that
the author was born and brought up in Spain, was no longer
young when he came to England, and then spoke English like
a foreigner.

Mrs. Hemans' line, "The Bowl ofLiberty," is elucidated by Plutarch's
striking account of the commemoration of Platosa when after
a visit to the sepulchres the Souls of the Heroes were invited
to the sacrificial feast, and the chief magistrate, filling a
bowl, gave the toast : " I drink to those who gave their lives
for the liberties of Greece."

No better school prizes than these two little
volumes could be given in our Board schools, and
it would be as well if both could be issued alike in
more elaborate and in cheaper forms, illustrated
editions for Christmas and other gift-books, and at
the price of Mr. Dent's admirable library.

Women are very disloyal to each other — I
reiterate the words. Neither Madame Bodichon,
the noble foundress of Girton College, nor Amelia
B. Edwards, the erudite explorer in recondite literary

ii8 AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS

fields, to say nothing of their brimful lives, has
found a biographer. Thanks to the courtesy of Sir
Sidney Lee, I have been permitted to pay each a
humble tribute in his great Dictionary of Biography.
No other woman I could ever discover has ever put
pen to paper for the purpose of recalling such
exemplars. No, in advancing years I am more and
more struck with the littleness and self-seeking of
my sex, and less and less desirous of seeing them
either in Parliament or holding any public office of
responsibility whatever.

VIII

AN HOUR WITH MISS BRADDON

A SIMPLE, dignified figure, sterling goodness
evidenced by look, word, and slightest action,
absolutely unspoiled by fame and " wealth beyond
the dreams of avarice," such was my impression of
the story-teller whose fifty volumes are popular in
every civilised language.

On learning that my great contemporary had
settled at Bexhill for the summer, I wrote beg-
ging her to favour me with a visit. Most cordial
was her reply. She had consulted her coachman ;
he in turn had consulted drivers familiar with the
road, and her horses, they said, would never be able
to climb to my terrace on the East Hill, still less
would they have the nerve to descend so steep a
bend. Again and pro tem. a still graver obstacle
stood in the way : her maid was away on holiday,
and no one else could lift her, crippled as she was
with rheumatism, in and out of the carriage.
Would I not give her the pleasure of my company
to tea some afternoon instead ?

So on the day and at the hour fixed I duly

IZ9

120 AN HOUR WITH MISS BR ADDON

reached the railway station, of course expecting to
be met. But no such thing. Pampered darUngs
must they have been, that pair of horses, I presume,
only put in harness once a day. So after waiting a
few minutes I hired a cab, with orders to be fetched
in an hour and a half.

Mrs. Maxwell was installed in a very handsome
set of apartments fronting the sea. On my name
being announced, a momentary awkwardness pre-
ceded a genial hour.

A tall lady, wearing rich black silk, rose from
her seat with a puzzled, interrogatory look. Then
she turned to a young lady having a little boy by
her side. Who was I, and how came I to be there ?
her face said. The pleasant daughter-in-law suc-
ceeded at last in making matters clear, tea
was served, and over it we chatted in friendliest
fashion. Mrs. Maxwell had now attained a dignity
not perhaps much coveted among ourselves but by
Frenchwomen considered the highest her sex can
attain. An imperial crown, the literary reputation
of a de Sdvign^ the unmatchable beauty of a Ninon
de Lenclos are a mere snap of the fingers compared
to that enthronement — namely, the fact of being a
grandmother. To be a mother, all very well ; but
to be a grandmother ! One must hear a French-
woman pronounce the words Je suis grandmere
to realise what such a pinnacle of glory means to
our friends over the water. Miss Braddon — how

SUCCESSFUL NOVELS 121

can we call her by any other name? — seemed to
know me best maybe only as a writer upon France
and French subjects. Almost pathetically she
alluded to her own travels, sojourns at Swiss and
other health resorts crowded in their season with
cosmopolitan globe-trotters.

"Ah!" I said, "could you only see as I have
seen French schoolboys devouring your translated
novels in the hour of recreation," and having drifted
into French topics she liked to hear more. It
seemed so new a thing to her, that almost second
nationality of mine, a country in which a good third
of my working years have been spent. One fact
I ought to have told her. By no means a deep
psychologist, for the most part describing men and
women as she found them, she would have learned
with interest that my maternal grandmother was of
French Huguenot stock, the family settling in
England after the committal of the greatest and
most atrocious crime in modern history — namely,
the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

But we chatted pleasantly enough, and all too soon
came the hour of departure. We never met again,
but a little later Henry James told me how kindly
she had received him at her Richmond home, and
what gratification the visit had afforded himself.

An endearing recollection, that meetincr with an
author whose very first stories — Ralph the Bailiff, and
others — had charmed me two generations before.

122 AN HOUR WITH MISS BRADDON

Why has this first-rate story-teller had no
biographer ? Her long life is not without lessons
alike to wise and simple literary aspirants. Several
circumstances are especially noteworthy in her
career. In the first place, she did not wake up
to find herself famous like the authoresses of The
Heavenly Twins and Robert Elsmere. She did not
win the crown without running the race. And in
the second, there was no falling-off in the quality
of her work. Her fiftieth novel was every bit as
engrossing and as well put together as her first.
There were no second or third bests, no Count
Robert of Paris to put Waverley to the blush.
And if, as has been written, her stories appeal to
" that low vice, curiosity," would not humanity sink
to the level of animals without it .•* Wherein else
does the higher differ from the lower in creation ?

A word or two about Mrs. Maxwell's early life
and career. The daughter of»a solicitor, she was
born in Soho Square in 1837, and when a mere
child began to write stories and verses, getting
poetic effusions, political squibs, and parodies into
the Poet's Corner of provincial newspapers, later
on contributing stories to Temple Bar and other
popular monthlies. Her comedietta called Loves of
Arcadia was produced at the Royal Strand Theatre
in i860, but without success. Nor was Garibaldi
and other Poems that followed more fortunate. But
in 1862 her story of the golden-haired murderess,

GOOD CLEAN WORK 123

Lady Audleys Secret, made every publisher in
London her liege lord. In three months were
sold no less than eight editions of the three-volume
edition published at a guinea and a half. Aurora
Floyd, 1863, which was no less sensational, proved
hardly less popular.

One secret of such enormous and world-wide
popularity is doubtless the wholesomeness and
cleanness of Miss Braddon's stories. Therein vice
is never sugared. No page, no sentence, tempts
youthful readers to lift the forbidden veil, by hook
or by crook to attain the knowledge that is as
the poison of asps, "a stumbling-block before the
children." Can any writer desire a nobler epitaph?

I add that following this happy afternoon came
two charming reminders. Shortly afterwards, and
on separate occasions, I received by post carefully
packed -boxes of rare and beautiful hothouse flowers
from Bexhill. Another touch of a large, generous
nature.

I add her letter to me, just her kind unspoiled
self in every line. But what would she have made
of C. P. ?

Winchester House,
Monday.

My dear Miss Edwards, — It is so kind of you
to leave your eagle's nest and to give me and mine
the pleasure of seeing you next Thursday afternoon.

I hope the day may be as fine as it is at this
13

124 AN HOUR WITH MISS BRADDON

hour — a lovely blue sky after a tropical storm last
night. — A jeudi, yours most sincerely,

Mary Maxwell.

P.S. — I should have loved to know Coventry
Patmore. He was one of my lost opportunities, as
I believe we were living near him in Hampshire
for some years — off and on. Alas ! much of my life
has been made of lost opportunities.

IX

A FRENCH TALK WITH LORD
KITCHENER

We Suffolkers have a quite touchingly clannish
feehng. It can no longer be said that two of my
countryfolks chance-met on the top of a London
bus would immediately recognise each other by
their "drant" — in other words, drawl; their in-
structions to the conductor, beginning at C major
and ending two octaves higher, at once identifying
them to the knowing. School Boards and cosmo-
politan habits for the most part have changed all
this, but were I to-day colloguing with contemporaries
in my native village near Ipswich I could " drant "
with the best of them.

I well remember an incident that occurred some
years ago when revisiting native haunts with my
cousin Amelia. In her ever polished and ornate
speech she asked of a hobbledehoy if we were on
the right road to Bramford. Had she spoken in
the language of the Pharaohs, he could not have
opened his mouth wider or looked more hopelessly
bewildered.

126 A FRENCH TALK WITH LORD KITCHENER

I immediately asked the way after his own
fashion, raising my voice three gamuts, whereupon
the lad's face brightened. He told us we were all
right and pulled his forelock, the local form of
touching the hat, as he received thanks and
twopence.

From the butcher's great son Cardinald Wolsey
downwards, Suffolk has shown a noble roll-call, and
in 1895 was founded the London Society of East
Anglians, its object being the promotion of good
fellowship and pleasant intercourse among persons
born in or connected with Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex,
and Cambridgeshire.^

The initiator, I believe, anyhow the warm sup-
porter of the movement, was my distinguished
friend and fellow-countyman, if I may coin the
expression. Sir Arthur Spurgeon. No relation, be
it mentioned, is the head of the great publishing
house of Cassell to the renowned preacher and
wholesale converter of sinners, whom I have heard
hold forth in melodramatic style to thousands in the
Ipswich Corn Exchange. Nor, it seems, have any
ancestors of this name been recorded in history, a
precedence always in some degree diminishing the
fame of after grenerations.

And now the East Anglian Society was to
celebrate the greatest day in its history.

On his triumphant return, the great Suffolker.

' Offices: 10 Vineyard Hill, Wimbledon, S.W.19.

A FIRST VIEW 127

vanquisher of the Mahdi and hero of Khartoum,
had accepted an invitation to a banquet offered him
by its members.

I was just then the guest of Mr. and Mrs.
Frederic Harrison in Westbourne Terrace. In
order not to disturb the household at a very late
hour, also to save myself much fatigue, I engaged a
bed at the great hotel facing the Thames, scene of
the banquet. I took care, of course, to be in good
time, and after making my toilet was duly guided
to the place reserved for me, near friends, in the
enormous dininor-hall.

We were all in our places with bated breath
awaiting the hero, and far too much on the qui vive
to exchange whispers, when at last the tension came
to an end, the band burst into God save the Queen,
followed by See the conquering hero comes, and our
guest appeared, a striking figure enough in himself,
but made more so by decorations blazing on his
breast.

In his early prime, eminently handsome, tall
of stature and magnificently proportioned, Lord
Kitchener might say after French fashion that he
had chosen his parents with the utmost discretion.
As he confronted us, graciously acknowledging burst
after burst of tumultuous cheers, a glance told you
that here was a man of iron indeed. No one could
behold that stern countenance without comprehend-
ing the terror it had inspired among subordinate

128 A FRENCH TALK WITH LORD KITCHENER

races, and how, as before the Veiled Prophet of
Khorassan, strong men had quailed before the gaze.

How I wish I could describe the most wonder-
ful eyes it has ever been my lot to behold and look
into at leisure. But I give up the task. Wherein
indeed lies the mystery, the whole man, the whole
woman, but in the eye ?

We fortunate ones — that is to say. East Anglians
— dined whilst admiring crowds looked on. Just as
Parisians gathered round the Tuileries to see Louis
Philippe, his spouse, and numerous progeny fall to,
which they good-humouredly did in public, by no
means disliking the compliment, so we were gazed
at as we ate and drank. On each side of the hall
ran a gallery, to-night filled with visitors of the
hotel. Not only had they the gratification of seeing
Lord Kitchener eat, but of hearing Sir (then Mr.)
Rider Haggard and one or two others respond to
the regulation toasts.

These very briefly over, we adjourned to the
reception room, and here the guest of the evening
held his court. One by one all present had the
honour of shaking hands with him, and, owing to
happy circumstances, I was privileged beyond the
rest. I had whispered a word in Sir Arthur
Spurgeon's ear. I wanted a few minutes' conver-
sation with the guest of the evening. Could I
obtain the privilege ?

No sooner was my favour asked than granted.

TRUTHS AND COMPLIMENTS 129

" I was particularly anxious to have this oppor-
tunity, Lord Kitchener," I began, "of conveying
to you the congratulations of a French colleague.
My old and valued friend, the late General Nicola,
former Military Governor of Paris, learned from my
letter of a few days back that I was to be here
to-night. But permit me to repeat his exact words."
I then went on in French, for I well knew Lord
Kitchener's familiarity with the language. " I re-
joice, dear friend," the General wrote, "that you are
to have the honour of meeting the great soldier
whose achievements have added so splendid a page
to the glorious history of British arms."

Having glided into French, my interlocutor did
the same, and for some minutes we chatted genially
on — were we not both Suffolkers, knit together by
an almost fraternal tie ? Lord Kitchener spoke
French as to the manner born and without the
faintest English accent, which perhaps is more than
I could say of myself !

Meantime we were the objects of quite legitimate
curiosity and equally legitimate envy. For I was
the only guest to whom more than a mere exchange
of compliments was granted. But I felt bound to
make room for others, so tore myself away, as I
passed on a lady stopping me.

"If not impertinent, 7nay I ask what you were
saying to Lord Kitchener ? " she asked. "He looked
so gratified and smiled so pleasantly."

I30 A FRENCH TALK WITH LORD KITCHENER

"We talked of France," I replied, and hurried
by. Yes, I had made Lord Kitchener smile, had
softened that stern visage as, I learned afterwards,
children could soften it.

A day or two later, a leading lady in London
society entertained the lion of the hour at a garden
party in Eaton Square.

" Imagine it ! " she told me afterwards. " Some
of the prettiest, most striking debutantes of the last
London season were there, but Lord Kitchener had
no eyes for these. He devoted himself all the time
to my quiet little Elizabeth, just twelve ! Fancy
such a man being fond of children ! No ' catch
of the season ' is Lord Kitchener. Vainly any
feminine snare set in sight of such a bird ! "

After a triumph the usual swallowing of humble
pie!

Next day my good friend, the late Professor
Beesly, lunched in Westbourne Terrace, and the
topic of last night's banquet immediately cropped
up, *' Did Lord Kitchener show you the Mahdi's
head ? " Professor Beesly cruelly asked, evidently
shocked at the fact that I should have countenanced
such a celebration.

The Positivists as a body had protested against
the Soudan campaign.

X

RECOLLECTIONS OF VISCOUNT
MORLEY

A Great Book^

This eagerly awaited work has not disappointed
public expectation. Deeply interesting as such a
record was sure to be, it is educational in the literary
sense of the word, epigrammatic, witty, and, last
but not least, very entertaining. Grave, momentous
pages are relieved by delightful touches of humour,
and the author does not hesitate to let his readers
enjoy a smile at his own expense.

It was in the early seventies that I first met
Mr. John Morley at the house of his friend, the late
distinguished Professor Beesly. The guest of the
evening had already attained a brilliant position
in the world of letters. Indeed, no writers outside
imaginative literature stood higher. His Ednmnd
Burke, Voltaire, and Co?npromise had already ap-
peared. He was editor of The Fortnightly Review

1 Recollections by John Viscount Morley, O.M., Hon. Fellow of
All Souls College, Oxford. In two volumes, sixth edition. Macmillan,
London.

13»

132 RECOLLECTIONS OF VISCOUNT MORLEY

and of the " English Men of Letters " series. Finest
personalities are often the least describable. Add
to the type of an English gentleman and a scholar
the qualities of reserve, adaptability to the circum-
stances of the moment, and an utter absence of
attempts to shine, such was my dinner-table im-
pression of Mr. Morley.

Quite naturally the conversation of such a
quartette turned upon books and authors. I well
remember with what enthusiasm the editor spoke
of a recent work by Thomas Hardy, maybe the
celebrated Far from the Madding Crowd. I always
play the part of listener when in good company, and
I don't think that I had then read the story or I
might have here had my innings. Being a practical
farmer I could have showed how, like Tom, Dick,
and Harry, or the wisest, the novelist made himself
ridiculous when talking of things he did not under-
stand. His heroine Bathsheba is described as
offering her own wheat for sale in the Market
Hall, precincts closed to women farmers as rigidly
as the other sex are shut out of the harem !
Like my Suffolk neighbours, widows and spinsters
having their names on their wagons, my samples
of corn in little brown paper bags were shown
by my headman, and among the more important
of us by a farm-bailiff. Hardy, by the way
a writer much too Zola-esque to please me,
and his pictures of farming life are exactly the

ABOUT ARTHUR YOUNG 133

opposite of my own and thoroughly practical
experiences.

The second time I met Mr. Morley was on the
celebration of Queen Victoria's Jubilee, 1897. Upon
that occasion, a soiree was given by women writers,
each being permitted to invite a guest of the other
sex. Some lady had been fortunate enough to
secure Mr. Morley, then editor of The Pall Mall
Gazette, Member for Blackburn, Irish Secretary,
and close friend and supporter of Mr. Gladstone.
A short, very short conversation is my last recol-
lection of one to whose editorial encouragement I
owed much. No one had taken more interest in
my studies of French life, and we talked for just
five minutes about Arthur Young, " that wise and
honest traveller," as he had styled him, whose
famous Travels in France I had edited for Bohn's
Library. No more. But it was something.

Although savouring of egotism I add a few
pleasant memories. Mr. Morley's editorial letters,
of which I had many, were always short and to the
purpose. Of my novel. Love and Mirage (now
published by Hutchinsons in their cheap series), he
wrote " graceful, interesting, and pathetic," and he
accepted for The Pall Mall Gazette and Macmillans
Magazine many of my sketches of French and
German life. Most of the former have since been
incorporated in my recent volumes on French life
and literature. Of the latter I am about to reissue

134 RECOLLECTIONS OF VISCOUNT MORLEY

the series entitled, " Letters from an Island," giving
an account of a summer sojourn in the island of
Riigen, with some very poignant notes of German
society and an anecdote of naval officers who landed
and had a drinking bout on the shore.

Memorable had been the intervening years in
Mr. Morley's career, and more memorable still were
to follow.

In The Fortnightly Review for January of the
present year another great Victorian has paid a
noble tribute to his friend, without at the same
time withholding a word of criticism regarding his
Recollections as a literary work. The title, urges
Mr. Frederic Harrison, should be Recollections and
Meditations. "Half of the book," he writes, "is
literature that may rank with that of our great
essayists from Bacon to Burke. Half of it is history
interspersed with memories of our leading states-
men. It is the political testament of a statesman
who has held great offices in critical times and has
been at the helm in many a storm. Again, it is the
lifelong study of literature by one who now for fifty
years has had no superior in the prose-writing of
this age."

"The defect," he adds, "perhaps inevitable, of
the volume is a certain discursiveness, of disjecta
membra. The narrative is not, as the French say,
coulant ; connecting links are wanting, we are too
suddenly plunged from one subject into another.

NO COURTIER 135

At the same time, there is a charm in these
incongruities."

Thus when writing to Lord Minto, Viceroy in
1906, himself being Secretary of State for India, he
rings the changes on grave poHtical matters thus :

"I am the least of a sportsman that ever was
born, and the sight of a tiger, except behind the
bars of the Zoological Gardens, would frighten me
out of my wits ; but I do rejoice to think that you,
who, I sincerely believe, are the most heavily
burdened public servant in the Empire, are seeing
the fresh life of the jungle, the Zemindars (land
holders), and all the rest that you so very pleasantly
describe."

Perhaps the most valuable pages of Lord
Morley's work are those in his second volume
devoted to India. Many chapters, it is hoped, will
be translated into the vernacular. Aristotle has
named magnanimity as the crowning virtue, and
certainly the very quality here needed. Nobly did
the Secretary of State protest against harsh and
repressive measures.

Lord Morley is, certes, no courtier. Has he
not in his first volume spoken of Queen Victoria's
chilling reception of himself.-* It is pleasant to
find from jottings here and there that he was a
persona grata at the court of the great Edward
VII. and of his son. Thus in the same year he
writes :

136 RECOLLECTIONS OF VISCOUNT MORLEY

" I'm bidden to Windsor for four days — very
agreeble always, only not rest''

Here is a gleaning from Lord Morley's sheaf of
dicta, epigrams, and witticisms, many of these as
certain to be incorporated into the English tongue
as have been those of his great forerunners. The
" Time is money " of Franklin ; the " Comparisons
are odious " of Shakespeare ; the " Enough is as good
as a feast " of Hey wood, to come to later times ; the
" Handsome is that handsome does " of Goldsmith ;
the •' Chip of the old block " of Burke ; the " Hand
and glove" of Cowper ; the "Keep your powder
dry " of Colonel Blacker and of our Victorian age ;
the " Muscular Christianity " of Kingsley ; the
" Rich in all — saving common sense " of Tennyson ;
the " Sweetness and light" of Swift, popularised by
Matthew Arnold ; and of the Georgians have we
not goodly promise ?

From Lord Morley's great book I quote the
following many citations, of course belonging to the
Edwardian period :

"We talked away without saying anything, as
men are so curiously apt to do."

"So-and-so looks as if he were well up in his
business and as if he minded that before other things
— the beginning of virtue in this world."

"What's the use of a historic sense if you don't
recollect your history ? "

" The proper memory for a politician is one

CITATIONS 137

that knows what to remember and what to
forget."

Of a magazine article on himself :

"It was the ill-natured word for a defect when the
good-natured word would have done quite as well."

•' I'm always finding the commonplace is the true
essential."

" All modern history and tradition associate
empires with war."

"War ostracises, demoralises, brutalises reason."

" Certain people with a genius for picking up
pins."

" People of good temper are not always kind
people."

Philanthropists and agitators :

" Most of what is decently good in our curious
world has been done by these two much-abused sets
of folk."

"Our master, the Man in the Street."

"Time is one thing, and eternity is another."

" A shining day worth living for."

" Waste of public money is like the Sin against
the Holy Ghost."

"That most tiresome of all things, an Act of
Parliament."

Of Keir Hardie, 1907 :

" Perhaps it is only these men with unscrupulous
preconceptions — knocking their heads against stone
walls — who force the world along."

138 RECOLLECTIONS OF VISCOUNT MORLEY

" I demur, in the uplifted spirit of the Trodden
Worm."

Concerning a stormy scene forthcoming in the
House of Commons :

" I shall survive in some shape or another, and
even if I don't, the sun will rise with his usual
punctuality next morning."

Under similar conditions :

" We will not bid good-morrow to the Devil
until we meet him."

" Do not count me a Slow Coach."

Concerning an emblazoned Indian inscription,
1909, promising Lord Ripon, Lord Minto, and him-
self a life in the Indian heart to all eternity :

"Time is quite enough for me, and you (Lord
Minto) are welcome to my share of the other, as
well as your own."

'* Deep is history in man, even although he may
seldom be alive to it."

"The humane attraction of a hale old age."

" Dramas are not made by words but by
situations."

" Loose logic is not enough to turn men
somnambulists."

" Needs of life and circumstance are the constant
spur."

Of the Victorian age :

" New truths were welcomed in free minds, and
free minds make brave men."

A POETIC ENDING 139

Of his pet dog :

" My little humble friend squats on her haunches,
looking wistfully up, eager to resume her endless
hunt after she knows not what, just like the chartered
metaphysician. So to my home in the fading
twilight."

A most poetic ending to pre-eminently the book
of 1917.

14

XI

**MARK RUTHERFORD'' (WILLIAM
HALE WHITE)

Doubtless with all the modesty of true genius, Mr.
Hale White would have plumed himself more upon
his comparatively unknown contribution to scholar-
ship than to the 120,000th edition of Mark
Rutkei'ford.

For this "walker by the way," gloveless, sun-
burnt, homely-looking, who at first sight one would
set down as a farmer, before settling down a few
doors from my dwelling, had translated Spinoza's
famous Tractatus, adding to a most lucid rendering
very valuable notes/

This is a beautiful book, and it is characteristic
of the author that he allowed a woman to revise his
work. But littleness could not enter into the com-
position of such a man, and none more caustic in
his deprecation of it in others.

I well remember his disgust when shopping in
Hastings one day. A carriage and pair drew up,

^ Fisher Unwin, 1895, is the date of my edition. Translated by
W. Hale White. Translation revised by Amelia Hutchinson Stirling,
M.A. (Edin.).

"MARK RUTHERFORD" 141

and straightway out flew the assistants, leaving him-
self, their customer, at the counter. His time, of
course, was of no consequence in their eyes, the
idle loungers must not be kept waiting a single
second.

He could also be sardonically humorous. One
morning we happened to meet, his daughter being
with him, at the Clock Tower, behind which lies a
small open space.

" If you or I had lived in times of burning
alive for heresy, what crowds would be gathered
there to behold the spectacle of us two at the stake,"
he said. A few minutes later the West End
omnibus we awaited arrived, and Miss White
and myself were about to step in when a private
carriage was driven up, and so closely to the pave-
ment as to threaten our feet.

"What the devil are you about?" broke forth
the irate philosopher, and he gave the presumptuous
lackeys the trouncing they so richly deserved.
Snobbery of this kind is not perhaps more con-
spicuous in Hastings than in other health resorts,
but. Heaven knows, lick-spittling and sycophancy
are rampant everywhere. Will high and low, rich
and poor, wise and simple acquire new standards of
excellence, new mental and moral valuations after
the great lessoning of the world's war ?

I always regretted that I could not find pleasure
in, could hardly indeed wade through Hale White's

£42 "MARK RUTHERFORD"

novels, so-called. He was by no means an un-
cheerful man, but his series of introspective studies
are in the melancholy to morbidness. Life to him
was pictured as a long-spun-out threnody — Why
was I born ? How much better not to have been
born, one felt to be the underlying sentiment.
Perhaps the secret of his fabulously numerous — the
great Sir Walter's did not go off more rapidly —
editions is thus accounted for by a clever friend :
" Folks are cheered up by finding how much worse
off are many others than themselves," she said. For
myself, I consider that they are more likely by far
to make people cut their throats or jump into the
nearest pond handy — to get "anywhere, anywhere
out of the world," as Hood's poem runs. But there
is no accounting for tastes — nor opinions — upon any
mortal thing !

XII
A TRIO OF PIONEERS

"Pioneers! O pioneers ! "—Walt Whitman.

Three noble pioneers, each in a quite different
field, each of whom at one time I saw much, here
deserve many pages. But the careers alike of Rose
Davenport- Hill, Frances Power Cobbe, and Eliza-
beth Blackwell, M.D., have been already told and
retold by more competent hands. I will therefore
only say of these good friends a very few words.

Were any of my sex — except foreign opera
singers — decreed a niche in the national Walhalla,
the above-named trio should surely be there com-
memorated, Catherine Booth, the apostolic mother
of the Salvation Army, and Josephine Butler,
friend of the fallen, keeping them company.

We must not hope for such recognition at the
hands of Dean and Chapter. Well might a French-
woman to whom I was introducing the Poets'
Corner in 1896 exclaim with astonishment:

" George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, absent — the only woman of the

144 A TRIO OF PIONEERS

Victorian epoch memorialised within these walls a
foreign opera singer ! "

A benevolent, admirable woman in her way was
"the Swedish Nightingale," and her voice was a
goodly gift of nature. But what tittle of a claim,
she said, had Jenny Lind, afterwards Frau
Goldschmidt, to a niche in Westminster Abbey ? ^

The greatest thinker of the nineteenth century,
one of its most illustrious novelists, a poet famous
as those two, shut out of the national Pantheon ! an
alien prima donna being adjudged worthier of place
therein than John Stuart Mill, Charles Reade, and
countless others, by sacerdotal authorities ! What
will posterity think of the anomaly ?

My almost lifelong friend. Rose Davenport-
Hill, belonged to that innumerable clan of Hills,
headed by their chieftain the great Sir Rowland.
Without tale are the public workers of this veritable
tribe, and without tale — i.e. innumerable — are the
family ramifications. There are Davenport- Hills,
Birkbeck- Hills, Berkeley- Hills, also Australian-
Hills, these again subdivided by affixes.

And one of the second dynasty, herself an in-
defatigable pioneer, is still among us. Florence
Davenport- Hill (daughter of the well-known
eminent Recorder of Birmingham) will ever be

1 Yes, she had a claim, for noble was the life of this so gifted
woman, both as an artist and a citizen and a woman, but of course
this was unknown to the outspoken Frenchwoman.

FLORENCE DAVENPORT-HILL 145

remembered as the friend and champion of women's
suffrage, of workhouse children, and later on as an
active supporter of Children's Courts.

To Florence Davenport- Hill, on her eighty-ninth
birthday, 19 18, and apropos of the Bill just passed
according women the parliamentary vote, I sent the
following quatrain :

" Dear champion of the children's cause,
Amender of unrighteous laws,
Years crown your efforts as they roll,
Now you'll frisk gaily to the poll."

She also for many years filled the office of guardian
of the poor.

Her sister's work on the London School Board
is too well known to educationists to need recapitu-
lation. One of several women elected to the first
body, greatly to J. S. Mill's rejoicing (see his
recently published Correspondence, 2 vols., 191 1),
she retained her seat for many years, aiding the
cause of national education with unfailing devotion,
ploddingness, and, marvellous to relate, gusto !

Therein lay the gist of her career. To this
enthusiast came no disillusion. The School Board
remained dear and engaging to the last. Day after
day she would set out from Belsize Avenue, neither
hail, rain, snow or blow, nor blackness Tartarean
damping her ardour, returning to the seven o'clock
dinner as alert as when starting, and ever with some-
thing piquant to relate. The humour of routine and

146 A TRIO OF PIONEERS

red tape would be delightfully brought out by one
who nevertheless was herself a routinist. No
innovator, no inventor, was this loyal member ; her
business, as she used to say, was to support the
policy of the Board. This was ever done whole-
heartedly and from high standpoints.

Her wit would occasionally enliven very sleepy
sittings. As she never made unnecessary speeches,
she used to put a piece of knitting in her bag, plying
her needles whilst listening. On being criticised for
such unconventional proceeding, Miss Davenport-
Hill remarked :

•' This is the first time that I ever remember
hearing a woman reproached for using her tongue
too little and her hands too much."

As a constant visitor to the Brentford Industrial
Schools, her work was more especially valuable.
And with what a glow she must have received the
many tributes from "old boys" in after years!
Not many months before her death one of these
wrote from the Colonies: "You have been as a
mother to me, and my start in life and present
well-being are your doing." Could any fame or
applause bring greater satisfaction to a public
worker, especially to a Hill.

Of Elizabeth Blackwell, for the past thirty
years my Hastings neighbour and anteriorly my
good friend, there is little new to say. Her early
struggles as a medical student are well known to

ELIZABETH BLACKWELL 147

all interested in the subject of women doctors, and
have been modestly but tellingly told by herself
in a volume well meriting reprint {^Pioneer Work :
Longmans).

As has repeatedly been the case with her
friend, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, the laurels
of her winning have been placed on other brows.
And now, "being very patient being dead," as
Coventry Patmore beautifully wrote, unless her
biographical record is very carefully prepared, the
same mistakes are sure to recur.

One incident of this most honourable career,
perhaps new to many, I will mention.

When, three-quarters of a century ago, a hand-
some Civil List Pension — I believe of ;^300 a year
— was offered to Harriet Martineau, she made the
dignified reply that, whilst most grateful to Her
Majesty's Government, the labours of earlier years
had enabled her to provide for her old age.
Elizabeth Blackwell, who began life as a teacher
of the pianoforte, thereby supporting her younger
sisters, in old age could have made an identical
reply to similar overtures. Retiring from practice
soon after reaching her sixtieth year, she purchased
a pretty little residence at Hastings, therein enjoy-
ing ease and dignity for yet another generation.
No woman of Victoria's reign has bequeathed a
finer, more practical, more disinterested lesson to
her younger sisters.

148 A TRIO OF PIONEERS

The wise and witty "Bagshot" of The West-
minster Gazette lately discoursed with much finesse
and pertinence on "the happy ending."

Frances Power Cobbe's life-story is an illus-
tration of the felicitous denouement, the happy end-
ing. Most of us know how she devoted herself to
the cause of helpless animals — in other words, the
cause of anti-vivisection. With indomitable courage
and unshaken faith she pursued her way, having
taken to heart the Platonic, the final lesson : "As
you properly conceive light and sight to be like
the sun but not to be the sun, so you must conceive
knowledge and truth to be of the nature of the
Supreme Good, but not either the one or other of
them to be that Supreme Good " {Republic, book vi.,
Whewell's translation). I have ever held this passage
of Plato to be an unanswerable argument against
vivisection in any form.

Impaired health, loss of a beloved lifelong
companion, diminished income, could not depress
such a nature as hers, but "the happy ending"
came welcomely all the same.

One morning she opened a letter from an un-
known solicitor, saying that a deceased client, like
herself, an ardent anti-vivisectionist, had bequeathed
her a handsome fortune. So for the rest of her
days, not only could she enjoy ease, comfort, and
the luxury of benevolence, but also the power of
propaganda. The capital at her death was willed

FRANCES POWER COBBE 149

to the cause for which she had sacrificed so
much.

Not very long before the end I received an
affectionate mid-winter invitation to her Welsh
retreat, one of the many invitations, alas ! most
regretfully refused by me of late years. North
Wales in the season of snowfalls ! Not even the
blazing logs and geniality of such a hostess could
have warmed me there in December.

But how happy we should have been together!
With what quips, cranks, and wanton wiles should
I have been beguiled ! What interminable talks
of old friends, old travel, and of the causes so dear
to both ! And we appreciated each other — that
being once said of intercourse, all is said !

I cannot do better than precede my colophon
with this noble life-story of " the happy ending."

XIII

MUDIE

Foremost among pioneers must be placed the
founder of Mudie's Library, a name suggesting
pleasant memories alike to high and low, rich and
poor, Radical or Tory, from end to end of the
British Dominions, i.e. a good third of the globe,
and counting a fourth of its entire population.

Between the years 1890 and 1900 I was stay-
ing with relations in North London, and used to
shake hands with Mr. Mudie after exchanging
books at New Oxford Street. Every morning he
drove past my brother-in-law's house on his way
into town, and two little imps of nephews used
to waylay the phaeton and get the treat of a lift.
Mr. Mudie rented a very handsome house stand-
ing in large grounds at Muswell Hill. I do not
remember that I was ever within its walls, nor
have I a very definite remembrance of the courteous
gentleman of the old school I often chatted with
in his sanctum ; it is a matter of regret to me that
I never carried away any memorial of our friend-
ship, neither a portrait nor autographed volume,

CHARLES E. MUDIE 151

nor anything in the shape of a memento, those
keepsakes which are as capital letters to Saints'
Days and Festivals in the Calendar. I am in-
debted to his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Arthur O.
Mudie, for the following account of him :

" Charles Edward Mudie was born at 5 Cheyne
Walk, Chelsea, October 18, 181 8, the youngest
of many sons of a Scotch bookseller. Among the
habitut^s of his father's bookshop were the two
Hazlitts, Madame D'Arblay, and Charles Lamb.
He was sent to a school kept by a retired officer
who had lost a leg at Waterloo, and who was
more successful as a disciplinarian than as an
educator ; but the boy's real education came from
the mother who had taught him very early to
read. At seven years old he could just reach
the ' S ' shelf in his father's shop, and Charles
Lamb coming in one day noticed the child sitting
on the floor behind the counter, deep in a volume
of Shakespeare. (Scott had already been sampled.)
My father well remembered the kindly pat on the
head and the dark eyes that looked into his face
when Lamb took him on his knee and asked him
about the play he had been reading.

"With so many elder brothers there was no
place for him in his father's business, and before
he was twenty he had opened a bookselling and
stationer's business in King Street, Bloomsbury.
This was soon frequented by students of the newly
founded London University, who told other young
men of literary tastes that Mudie knew something

152 MUDIE

of the inside of the books he sold. Finding that
needy scholars longed to study books they were
too poor to buy, it struck him that a circulating
library which could provide other literature than
fiction, up to that time the only stock of such
libraries, would be a boon to such readers. He
brought down his own private library and put the
books in the window. Within twenty-four hours
every volume was in circulation, and he ventured
on his first order from the publishers of * select '
books, this being then the trade term for history,
travel, science, or belles-lettres. This was in 1843.

" The parlour from which the books had been
fetched became a ' rendezvous ' for many of these
young men, and they held there a 'cofi"ee sym-
posium.' Among the men who gathered there
were Richard Hutton, Frederick Tennyson and
Charles Tennyson Turner, David Masson, and,
later, several of the Italian exiles then in London.

" He had already published for the first time
in England Emerson's Essay, to which he gave
the title, Man Thinking.

"In 1844 he published the first edition in England
of James Russell Lowell's poems, and, with the
audacity of six-and-twenty, he, in the same year,
published for Mazzini his pamphlet on the Bandiera
incident.

" A few days before starting on his fatal Arctic
expedition Sir John Franklin came in to choose
books for the voyage, and among the earliest
subscribers were Anna Swanwick, the Wedg-
woods, Tom Hughes, and F. Denison Maurice.

BIOGRAPHICAL 153

"His tastes were strongly for music and art,
and he was the friend and earliest patron of many
of the younger artists of his day. He possessed
the first exhibited pictures of Fred Walker, Albert
and Henry Moore, Stacy Marks, and Vicat Cole.
In politics he was a Liberal ; he was a brilliant
chess player, but his chief recreation he found in
travel. As a young man he travelled over great
parts of Britain on foot. After his marriage in
1847 he seldom passed a year without visiting the
Continent, chiefly Italy and the Mediterranean,
was several times in Greece, travelled in Palestine,
Syria, and Egypt, and made a visit to relations
in a remote district of Asia Minor, in all regions
making friends with the people and interesting
himself in their life and customs.

"With wife and children he was in Italy during
the War of Liberation in 1859, which his warm
sympathies with the cause of the Risorgimento
made trebly interesting to him.

" Of his intercourse with authors it would be
impossible to give a concise account. Of foreign
librarians and publishers his most friendly con-
nections were with Vieusseux of Florence, Von
Ceroid of Vienna, and Baron Tauchnitz of Leipzig. "

"He died, after a long illness from paralysis, in
October 1890."

His forefathers were Scandinavians, the
patronymic Mudadi meaning bold, courageous.
The great librarian was eminently a domestic
character, eschewing alike politics, officialism, and

154 MUDIE

matters that would take him from his business and
his family. Foreign travel was his favourite relaxa-
tion, and on their travels in France, Germany,
Switzerland, and Italy, Mr. and Mrs. Mudie were
accompanied by their children and nurses. It was
not till the number of the little ones overpassed five
that they left them behind, or, as his daughter ex-
presses it, "made a selection." Once, and once
only, did the parents travel by themselves. To
celebrate their silver wedding they visited Egypt
and Palestine.

No more generous or thoughtful employer ever
lived than the magnate of Muswell Hill, as in his
last years Mr. Mudie might be called. Patriarchal
as a Scotch laird, his fine mansion resembled those
ancestral halls we read of, in its precincts being
housed several generations. But his innate bene-
volence was pathetically attested by those to whom
his only relation was that of employer and employed.
When his chief binder lay dying, his last request
was that he should be buried as near as possible to
his beloved chief.

Here is another beautiful story.

During a serious illness of Mr. Mudie it came to
lio-ht that one of his messengers, an old Indian
soldier, Irishman and Roman Catholic, had been
for weeks paying for Masses at Brompton Oratory
for his master's recovery, and on his return to busi-
ness the good old man completely broke down, so

PLEASANT MEMORY 155

overcome was he by joy. Never was a " great
captain of industry " more cherished by those to
whom they were indebted for a start in Hfe or a
help by the way.

I am orratified to find that although I have no
vivid remembrance of my host and hostess at
Muswell Hill, my visit is not forgotten by the
present head of the house.

" My memory is still good enough to remember
your visit when I was quite a youngster," writes
Mr. Arthur O. Mudie. " I remember also the
reverence and awe with which you were announced.
And I know quite well with what an amusing little
blush my father would have heard of you naming
him in your Victorian memories."

He was one of those sensitive men who must
blush at such tributes.

15

XIV

MR. JOHN MURRAY

It is fitting that some pages should be devoted,
rather should I say dedicated, to the head of the
greatest publishing house in the world. Next in
rank to the firm in Albemarle Street stands that of
Hachette, Paris, to whose members I am hardly less
indebted. My indebtedness to the first is twofold.
In the first place, the lucky accident that led to my
revision of the famous Handbook to France brought
me friends in every corner of "the splendid
hexagon," rendering it for many years my second
home. In the second, those delightful sojourns and
entrancing studies have won for me the recognition
of the Third Republic and a title of honour I regard
as one of the proudest I could receive.

How it came about that I undertook to bring
Murray's Handbook for Travellers in France, parts
I and 2, up to date, I do not precisely remember.
I rather think that it was due to an account I sent
Mr. Murray of Dijon — its celebrated gingerbread,
the invention of a Duke of Burgundy, its equally
celebrated mustard, pills, and other manufactures,

1S6

THE THIRD JOHN MURRAY 157

and last but not least, the famous wine cellars of
M. Paul Guillemot. Be this as it may, Mr. Murray
sent me a very handsome acknowledgment of the
voluntary contribution, and on my return to England
I called upon him at his request. My first visit was
followed by others, the result being that I under-
took a task profitable and pleasant in the extreme.
A thorough revision of the original Handbook
necessitated not only a comprehensive knowledge of
French history but also of France itself. I had,
therefore, before me many wanderings, many in
out-of-the-way regions, Brittany I already knew/
also Auvergne,^ also Nimes and Avignon, having
French companions on the road, and at each
stopping-place the welcome of a French roof. Thus
it came about that I had, so to say, the entire
map of France in my pocket. To co-ordinate and
render permanently useful this mass of laboriously
accumulated knowledge at first hand was precisely
the opportunity that Mr. John Murray and no one
else could give me, and with only one reservation
he gave it.

Naturally enough my name was not to appear
on the title-page. What were my claims to those
of the originator of the Handbook ?

But let me begin my story at the beginning.

^ A Year in Western France, Longmans, 1875, recently reprinted.
' " A Month in Auvergne," Macmillan's Magazine, about same
date.

158 MR. JOHN MURRAY

The first of the dynasty had chosen his parents with
the utmost possible discretion, to cite a French
phrase I love. A charming portrait of John Murray
the First accompanies his biography.^ Strange to
say, the publishing house, which dates from 1768,
was founded by a Lieutenant of Marines ! Having
retired from the service that year on half- pay, John
MacMurray purchased the bookselling business of
William Sandby at the sign of the " Ship," No. 32
Fleet Street, opposite St. Dunstan's Church.

John MacMurray was descended from the
Murrays of Atholl. His uncle, Colonel Murray,
was "out" in the rising of 1715 under the Earl of
Mar, served under the Marquis of Tullibardine, the
son of his chief, the Duke of Atholl, and led a
regiment in the abortive fight of Sheriffmuir. After
the rebellion, Colonel Murray retired to France,
where he served under the exiled Duke of Ormonde,
who had attached himself to the Stuart Court. The
Colonel's brother Robert followed a safer course.
He prefixed the "Mac" to his name, settled in
Edinburgh, adopted the law as a profession, and
became a Writer to the Signet. He had five
children, the youngest of whom was the John above
mentioned, born in 1745. He entered the Royal
Marines, but after the Treaty of Paris, signed twenty
years later, retired on half-pay, dropped the prefix

* See A Publisher and his Friends, by the late Samuel Smiles,
LL.D., new and revised edition. London, John Murray, 1910.

JOHN MacMURRAY 159

" Mac," and announced himself to the public in the
following terms :

" John Murray, successor to Mr. Sandby (whose
daughter he had married), Bookseller and Stationer
at No. 32 over against St, Dunstan's Church
in Fleet Street, London, sells all new Books
and Publications. Fits up Public or Private
Libraries in the neatest manner with Books of the
choicest Editions, the best Print and the richest Bind-
ings. Also executes East India or foreign Com-
missions by an assortment of Books and Stationery,
suited to the Market or Purpose for which it is
destined : all at the most reasonable rates."

The portrait of John Murray the First, which
forms the frontispiece, is interesting. No trace here
of the gallant sailor who urged his friend Falconer
of the Shipwreck to become his partner. We
should at once set down the sitter as a man of
thought rather than of action, a scholar, a critic, a
philosopher, anything indeed but one of those
Mariners of England to whom " a wet sheet and a
flowing sea and a wind that follows fast " have been
their element. In the reflective, expressive, and
regular commanding features we see a striking
likeness to the present head of this great
house.

Among the first books issued by the firm were
new editions of Lord Lyttelton's Dialogues of the
Dead and of his History of King Henry the

i6o MR. JOHN MURRAY

Second, in stately quartos ; also Walpole's Castle of
Otranto. What would not collectors give for these
curios ?

Every page of these memoirs recalls some note-
worthy event. Here is one. On December 20,
1784, a correspondent writes to the Rev. Mr.
Whittaker : ^ " Poor Dr. Johnson's remains passed
my door for interment this afternoon. They were
accompanied by thirteen mourning coaches with
four horses each ; after these a cavalcade of the
carriages of his friends. He was about to be buried
in Westminster Abbey."

To John Murray the Second, Lord Byron's
"My Murray," the " Anax of publishers" and
founder of the Quarterly Review, 1 778-1 843, suc-
ceeded, 1808-92, the founder of the famous
Handbook. Educated at the Charter House and
Edinburgh University, he travelled all over Europe
and wrote most of the European Handbooks, which
were entirely original. I do not believe, writes
the present head of the house, that he copied a
single page from any existing work. He was
a good Latin, Greek, German, and French
scholar, and a special student of Geology and
Architecture.

I am tempted to dwell upon one or two phases
of this fascinating volume, every page teeming with

^ Probably the Rev. John Whitaker, antiquarian and divine,
1735-1808.

THOUGHTS ON EDITORS i6i

interest. To pick out the plums would be a hope-
less task, so redundant are they. Here is a jeii
desprit of Tom Moore, apropos of this entry in his
popular Diary : " Saw my ' Lord Edward Fitz-
gerald ' as one of the articles to be abused of course ;
and this too immediately after my dinings and
junketings with both editor and publisher."

THOUGHTS ON EDITORS
Editur and Edit

No ! Editors don't care a button
What false and faithless thing they do,

They'll let you come and cut their mutton,
And then, they'll have a cut at you.

With Barnes I oft my dinner took,
Nay, met e'en Horace Twiss to please him;^

Yet Mister Barnes traduc'd my Book,

For which may his own devils seize him !

With Dr. Bowring I drank tea.

Nor of his cakes consumed a particle ;

And yet the ungrateful LL.D.

Let fly at me, next week, an article.

John Wilson gave me suppers hot,"

With bards of fame like Hogg and Packwood ; -

A dose of black-strap ^ then I got,
And after, a still worse of Blackwood.

^ Writer and politician, 1786- 1849.

^ I can find no one of this name in encyclopaedias.

' A mixture of spirituous liquor and molasses.

i62 MR. JOHN MURRAY

Alas ! and must I close the list
With thee, my Lockhart of the Quarterly ?

So kind with bumper in thy fist,

With pen, so very gruff and tartarly.

Now in thy parlour feasting me.

Now scribbling at me from your garret,

Till 'twixt the two, in doubt I be,
Which sourest is, thy wit or claret?

Murray the Second's transactions with Byron
threw the earnings of successful contemporaries into
the shade. For three cantos of " Don Juan " Mr.
Murray paid ;^2ioo!

In 1826 Mr. Murray lost ;^26,ooo through an
unfortunate journalistic speculation, that of the
Representative. On this subject he wrote to
Washington Irving : " One cause of my not writ-
ing to you during a whole year was my ' entangle-
ment,' Lady G says, with a newspaper which

absorbed my money, and distracted and depressed
my mind ; but I have cut the knot of evil, which I
could not untie, and am now, by the blessing of
God, returned to reason and the shop."

One of the most appealing chapters in the book
is that called " Sir Walter's Last Years," giving last
glimpses of our beloved romancer. Sad, indeed,
perhaps the saddest in literary annals, is the final
stage of his glorious career. Southey's, indeed, is
pitiable enough, as, worn out in body and mind, he
fondled the books he could no longer read with
understanding, but Sir Walter's touched the last

LITERARY LEVEES 165

note in tragedy, the pen dropping from his enfeebled
hand, the dismal truth dawning on his mind that
the wand was broken, the wizard's charm was gone.
Most interesting is an account of Mr. Murray's
literary levees in what he does not disdain to call
•'the shop,"^ and no less so the correspondence
during the same period, 1830-43. Here is a
letter from the Countess Guiccioli, Byron's lady-
love, who at this period visited London and received
much kindness at the hands of Mr. Murray. After
her return to Rome she wrote a long letter thanking
him for a beautifully bound volume of the landscape
and portrait illustrations of Lord Byron's works.
She complained, however, of the portrait of herself
by an artist named Brockedon.^ " It is not resemb-
ling, and to tell the truth, my dear Mr. Murray, I
wish it was so, not on account of the ugliness of
the features (which is also remarkable) but particu-
larly for having this portrait (sic) an expression of
stupidity and for its being molto antipatico, as we say
in our language. But perhaps it is not the fault of
the painter, but of the original, and I am sorry for
that. What is certain is, that towards such a

^ See Mrs. Bray's Autobiography, 1799-1883. Her maiden name
was Kempe, and she wrote a score or more of historical novels, popular
in their day. A twelve-volume edition of her stories was issued
in 1884.

2 William Brockedon, artist and lecturer. See Reminiscences of
a Literary Life, by Charles MacFarlane, with an introduction by John
F. Tattersall. John Murray, 191 7.

i64 MR. JOHN MURRAY

creature nobody may feel inclined to be indulgent ;
and if she has faults and errors to be pardoned for,
she will never be so on account of her antipatia.
But please don't say so to Mr. Brockedon."

In 1842 the health of this indefatigable worker,
and one to whom English literature is so much
indebted, began to fail. On June 27, 1843, he
passed away in his sleep at the age of sixty-five.
He left behind him a spotless reputation, and among
the world-wide tributes to his memory none is more
touching than that of " the American Hemans,"
Mrs. Lydia Sigourney, who wrote from Hartford,
Connecticut : " Your father's death is a loss which
is mourned on this side of the Atlantic. His power-
ful agency on the patronage of a correct literature,
which he was so well qualified to appreciate, has
rendered him a benefactor in that realm of intellect
which binds men together in all ages, however
dissevered by political creeds or local prejudice."

With this enviable In Memoriam I will take
leave of a worthy subject of a delightful biography,
a new edition of which is welcome to all lovers of
literary history.

XV

POSTSCRIPT

And now, to cite one of the most famous books of
any time and in any language, " I have done with
my island and all about it," may I with apology add
a word ?

It is a source of the greatest gratification to me
that these memorials should appear in the year of
my diamond jubilee, and that a new handsome
edition of my first work ( The White House by the
Sea, 1857), with biographical notes and illustrations,
in commemoration of so rare a literary event, is to
be brought out by the house of Collins, of London
and Glasgow.

i6s

PRINTED BY

MORRISON AND GIBB LTD,

EDINBURGH

-^S4^J^°^ ASCENTS

I^D 21-100^-8, .34

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY